The World in 2050 | Diplomatic Courier | January 2020 Edition

DIPLOM ATICOURIER.com

A Global Affairs Media Network VO L UME 1 4 I ISSUE 1 I J AN UARY 2020 I DAVOS

2050

[y]our future

BY CHRIS LUEBKEMAN, WITH JONELLE SIMUNICH

RETHINKING CREATIVITY WITH ETH ZURICH

GREAT POWERS & URBANIZATION

WORLD INNOVATION SUMMIT ON EDUCATION

3D PRINTING CONCRETE FOR A SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE

CITIES OF THE NEW SILK ROADS AND CITIES IN A WORLD OF STATES

EDUCATION RESEARCH AT WISE PREPARES US FOR THE FUTURE

By Ana Anton p16

By Simon Curtis & Ian Klaus p26

By Allyson Berri p52

Concrete Choreography, Stage Design for the Origen Summer Festival 2019. Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich. Image: ETH Zurich / Benjamin Hofer

ETH Zurich — The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology meets you in Davos, Switzerland during the 2020 World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting. Join us for an interactive exhibition and event series at the interface of science and creativity. http://bit.ly/ETHMeetsDavos2020

RETHINKING

»CREATIVITY

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Contents VO L UME 1 4 I ISSUE 1 I J AN UARY 2020 I DAVOS

06 I Editor’s Note The Next Moonshot By: Ana C. Rold

08 I Cover Story 2050: [y]our Future

24 I Creating Living Machines By: Roland Siegwart

26 I Three Challenges in Rendering Next Generation Robots By: Stelian Coros

By: Chris Luebkeman with Jonelle Simunich

I CHANNEL Rethinking Creativity 16 I 3D Printing Concrete For a Sustainable Architecture By: Ana Anton

20 I Imagining Reality By: Robert Sumner

22 I How a Walk on the Beach Will Help You Understand Quantum Computing By: Jonathan Home

I CHANNEL Great Powers & Urbanization 30 I Introducing the Great Powers and Urbanization Channel By: Ian Klaus

32 I Cities in a World of States

40 I Cities of the New Silk Roads By: Simon Curtis & Ian Klaus

44 I Editorial: Can Technology Save Healthcare?

By: Garif Yalak

I CHANNEL World Innovation Summit on Education 48 I Rethinking Education: An Inside Look at WISE By: Allyson Berri

By: Charles S. Maier

36 I Cities and International Lawyers Need to Start Talking to One Another

52 I Education Research at WISE Prepares Us for the Future By: Allyson Berri

By: William Burke-White

Masthead Publishing house Medauras Global publisher & ceo Ana C. Rold EDITOR-At-Large Molly McCluskey Creative Director Christian Gilliham director of social media Winona Roylance Contributing EDITORS Duncan Cox Chris Purifoy Winona Roylance Jacksón Smith Shane Szarkowski Shalini Trefzer

CONTRIBUTORS Ana Anton William Burke-White Manjula Dissanayake Stelian Coros Charles Crawford Simon Curtis Marc Ginsberg Caroline Holmund Jonathan Home Coby Jones Sarah Jones Ian Klaus Charles S. Maier Arun S. Nair Uju Okoye Roland Siegwart Robert Sumner Garif Yalak

COVER Story Chris Luebkeman With Jonelle Simunich Creative Contributors Michelle Guillermin Amy Purifoy Sebastian Rich Editorial Advisors Andrew Beato Fumbi Chima Sir Ian Forbes Lisa Gable Anders Hedberg Greg Lebedev Anita McBride DC CORRESPONDENTS Allyson Berri Jakob Cordes

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ISSN. The Library of Congress has assigned: ISSN 2161-7260 (Print); ISSN 2161-7287 (Online).

ISBN: 978-1-942772-01-9 (Print); 978-1-942772-02 (Online).

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ART/PHOTOGRAPHY/ILLUSTRATIONS. In order of appearance: page 4, logomark by Issuu; page 6, photo by Joyce Boghosian; pages 10-13, all illustrations courtesy of Arup Global and Arup Foresight; pages 16-25, all images courtesy of ETH Zurich and ETH Global; pages 47-54, all images courtesy of WISE Summit 2019 and Qatar Foundation. All other images and photos

by Bigstockphotos.com, Unsplash.com and Pixabay.com. All advertising images supplied by the respective individuals, organizations, or companies advertising.

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letters to the editor/ editorial submissions editors@diplomaticourier.org

LEARNING & CREATIVITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY Fostering Talent through Education, Innovation, and Recruitment 27 - 28 APRIL 2020 | AARHUS, DENMARK

www.globaltalentsummit.org

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Welcome VO L UME 1 4 I ISSUE 1 I J AN UARY 2020 I DAVOS

Ana C. Rold Publisher & CEO

The Next Moonshot If 2019 was a critical year for spurring activity—albeit not tangible action—on climate change, 2020 will be a vital year because it ushers the final countdown to deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

For more than a decade, our editors and writers have embraced the skills, practices, and behaviors of futurists, covering the trends that are defining our global society. Through our World in 2050 think tank/do tank we have explored the future of diplomacy; philanthropy; connected cities; jobs and education; and, much more. So, how does the future look like?

“The changes we have witnessed during our lifetimes will pale in comparison to those which lie before us,” says our cover story author and director of global foresight at Arup, Chris Luebkeman. We are privileged to usher the new year and new decade with his wise words in this special edition launching in Davos. For those who have been our diligent readers since the start, you will note we are consumed with the world in 2050: how will major global forces such as demographic changes, resource stress, technology, and economic power shifts change our future? And is the future something we can truly foretell?

Those in the “foresight” sphere have told me no, it’s not possible. But it is possible to push ourselves to imagine, understand, and plan the future. Chris, together with Jonelle Simunich, have authored a report that looks at four plausible futures. They are plausible because each is found somewhere on Earth; we are already living some versions of these scenarios. In this crucial year and decade, it is up to us to craft a path for one of these futures based on what we decide to prioritize.

At Diplomatic Courier believe the future is a story we write ourselves. It’s being written every day by engineers, students, business leaders, and startup founders. This is why, we have opened our global platform to finding and supporting these authors and visionaries of our human future.

If I have just described you, dear reader, then I urge you to join us by applying to the Olympics of Innovation, our yearly global innovation list that champions top ideas, startups, and innovations in seven categories. The program focuses on solutions in seven clusters representing transformative trends for our long-term future.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University where he delivered these words: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade”, that planted the seeds to align an entire country to go to the moon. We could say that JFK did not set that goal by knowing how we could achieve it or by promising it would be easy, he simply said that we were going to accomplish something incredible, setting the timeframe and inspiring toward action.

The idea of “moonshot” is that there are no limitations to what we can achieve as a society if we put our minds and imagination to the task. What is your moonshot?

Tell us at www.cocreate.world! ●

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ANNOUNCES

THE OLYMPICS OF INNOVATION 21 JANUARY 2020 | DAVOS, SWITZERLAND

Nominations are now open for the best projects, ideas, and startups in seven categories.

APPLY TODAY 2050CHALLENGE.COM

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COVER STORY WORLD IN 2050

2050 [y]our future

BY CHRIS LUEBKEMAN, WITH JONELLE SIMUNICH Dr. Chris Luebkeman is Arup Fellow and Advisor to the President and Executive Board at ETH Zurich. Jonelle Simunich is Senior Strategist at Global Foresight, Research and Innovation at Arup. The full version of the 2050 scenarios can be found at www.arup.com/2050scenarios.

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COVER STORY WORLD IN 2050

I

t seems that our understanding of the future is more unsettling than ever. The changes we see around us are both completely understandable and totally baffling. I find myself meandering between hope and despair, between belief and disbelief, in ever increasing amplitude. ‘‘Spaceship earth,” as Buckminster Fuller called it, is a closed system wherein all the resources we need are found, and limited.

Like being in a spaceship, we must be conscious of which, and how many resources are used; as their existence and ability to regenerate will determine if we survive or thrive. This is the only planet we have, and it must be able to nurture all living beings, great and small. Today, the natural ecosystems of our planet are degrading at an increasing rate. At the same time, the human condition has never been better.

So, why my meandering path? Because, the changes we have witnessed during our geologically minusculely short lifetimes will pale in comparison to those which lie before us. Because, the interaction of these two systems is complex, complicated and on a collision course. Because, we still have the opportunity to write our story of tomorrow which is also an opportunity to change, influence, and drive it towards a future we will be proud of.

Arup has aligned its business with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); not just a few, but all 17.

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A multi-year engagement process was undertaken to develop a deeper understanding of what they mean in practice for disciplines, businesses, and different regions. Part of this process was the development of a set of four plausible scenarios, or stories, for the future. It is now recognized that human systems are putting our planetary systems under significant stress. Thus, we thought it appropriate to consider four worlds in which these two systems would be juxtaposed as the axes.

Each of the scenarios are compelling for different reasons: from a world where both the societal and natural systems move towards collapse, to one where symbiosis is the baseline for all activities on our planet. We believe that these four worlds are consistent, coherent, and plausible.

Sometimes we must push ourselves to think outside of our daily lives, and envision the world as it could be, should be, might be, what we hope it will be and what we hope it won’t be. Although future pathways are not crystal clear, we can, and must, move forward with both aspiration and intent. These scenarios are intended to help us all consider how we craft the parameters of that intent.

We hope these four scenarios inspire you to consider how you can be the best ancestor that you can be, for all of humanity both for today and the generations to come.

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COVER STORY WORLD IN 2050

POST ANTHROPOCENE Both people and planet are on the path to a regenerative world.

Society consumes resources at a rate that can be replenished, populations are diverse, and societal structures are balanced.

Science Based Targets (SBTs) for resource use and emissions are well established and are key to today’s recovering planet. The 2020s saw technology companies hotly contending for the position of ‘green leader’ driven by competing aspirations in ‘green tech’ and philanthropy.

Humanity is well on its way towards a shared consciousness and understanding of Earth’s limited resources, realizing that production and consumption are intrinsically

Each of the scenarios are compelling for different reasons: from a world where both the societal and natural systems move towards collapse, to one where symbiosis is the baseline for all activities on our planet. We believe that these four worlds are consistent, coherent, and plausible. linked to the natural environment.

There is no ‘away’ to throw discarded things. Global ecosystem services are recognized and valued, helping to improve the quality of both planet and people. Circular processing procedures are adopted

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and implemented by most nations.

Full life-cycle and ecological resource assessments are mandatory for all new products. Global biodiversity loss has halted, and protected areas are seeing ecosystem recovery. Every person has, and knows, their carbon quota and daily spend; AI provides personalized daily updates and state governments penalize overspend. The multistakeholder vision for an equitable and thriving future has prevailed.

All global leaders are proud to wear the ‘thriving planet = thriving people’ symbol, showing their support for the drive towards the post-Anthropocene epoch. Cities around the world have transitioned from being in conflict with nature to something approaching symbiosis.

COVER STORY WORLD IN 2050

GREENTOCRACY Climate action and biodiversity recuperation are the top line of every national and transnational agenda. The result of the galvanized global efforts has been unprecedented for the environment, but not without significant sacrifice from people who are realizing the trade-offs did not quite work out for them. Humanity now lives in self-imposed servitude to the environment under the mantra of ‘happy planet, happy people.’

For most of the last two decades, the Earth and its health have enjoyed the highest priority in the public consciousness. The scale and speed of environmental degradation of the first quarter of the century, with extreme weather events, rising urban air pollution and climate migration, drove governments and major global cities

to act swiftly, and strictly, on climate action. Protected lands expanded worldwide and resources were allocated to restoring ecosystems.

The extinction curve is flat and many species are now regenerating. The effects of climate change can still be felt, yet the impacts are less severe than predicted.

Environmental prioritization was an achievement of the SBT initiative and the ecological global framework adopted at COP32 as targets were integrated into all aspects of legislative decision making. Many countries appointed powerful scientific advisory boards that directly influence national legislation adopting strict regulation and large-scale punitive measures for those that continued businessas-usual operations.

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Diets are barely recognizable from what they were 30 years ago.

The prices for carbon-intensive foods, such as coffee and meat, have increased 500% compared to 2020 levels, with strict allowances in place for every citizen. Extreme urban densification, driven by urban growth boundaries for land-use regeneration, led to a premium on space. As a result, many low-income individuals are living in small, yet sustainable, apartments— an average of 8m2 per person.

Pervasive carbon taxation and individual carbon allowances have severely slowed consumerism for the aspiring global middle-class. To save on their carbon allowance, people regularly repurpose used items and upcycling is at an all-time high, with a thriving ’Do Everything Yourself (DEY)’ culture.

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COVER STORY WORLD IN 2050

EXTINCTION EXPRESS Climate change and the relentless consumption of Earth’s resources has resulted in the destabilization of natural systems. Resource, energy, water, and food shortages are pervasive across the world. There is a stark division between the have-lots and the have-nots. Goods are easily accessible, but only to the wealthy few. The global middle class is almost non-existent. Information and knowledge exchange across borders is shaped by protectionism, and five independent internets have developed.

Environmental consciousness is non-existent. The Amazon rainforest, once one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, is almost entirely cleared.

Resource colonies on the moon and in the deep sea have been established as demand for natural resources is a massive incentive to reach and operate

in these inaccessible and inhospitable locations.

Natural resources that were previously taken for granted and considered basic human rights—such as water, air, ozone, land, and the oceans—are now genuine commodities. Water is highly regulated with restricted access; corporations now hold the monopoly on the majority of the global water supply. Those who can’t afford the cost of water must rely on erratic, usually contaminated, water sources. Similarly, clean air is accessible only to those who can afford it. Largescale air domes have been erected over many of the world’s most prominent cities, to create safe havens for some segments of the population. Those people restricted from accessing air domes experience increased rates of asthma and lung cancer, that go largely

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untreated. Agricultural systems have suffered extensively from the transformed climate and irregularity of the new extreme weather patterns.

Geo-engineering and GMO crop development are the only way to feed the global population.

Most nations have adopted nationalist agendas. They only look outwards to bilateral agreements for the exchange of natural resources and food. Mass climate migration and resource wars are now common occurrences. Governments are widely criticized by their constituents, accused of willfully shirking their responsibilities towards ecosystem health.

Society is driven by a fear of the ‘foreign’ and ‘different.’ This has been exacerbated by an unheralded number of climate refugees and there is a constant challenge to ever-increasing global authoritarianism.

COVER STORY WORLD IN 2050

HUMANS INC. For most people, life is as good as it’s ever been. Major advances have occurred in the former developing world where life expectancy has increased and infant mortality has decreased. Many nations have seen a renaissance of social state principles, with new welfare economies continually developing around the globe. Governments have provided new or upgraded housing, social services and Universal Basic Income (UBI) for those in need. Philanthropy has become mainstream. The increase in global societal conditions has come at the cost of environmental degradation due to a focus on improving living conditions, access to education, jobs, and resources.

In many ways, this reflects a business-as-usual trajectory from 2020: the condition of humanity

has continued to improve at the expense of the environment. Climate considerations are subordinate to economic development and societal wellbeing. When coordinated action continued to falter on a global level, some settled for adaptation programs.

Future-proofing their own critical infrastructure while protecting their populations is a priority.

A sense of urgency for climate action is palpable, but “Why should we go first?” or “Not in My Backyard” dominates the dialogue. Thus, most national governments hesitate or delay the needed large-scale actions.

The amplitude and frequency of extreme weather events increased throughout the 2020s and 30s, with wetter wets and drier dries, hotter hots and colder colds. Major cities

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across the world repeatedly experienced flooding of their subway systems, and are now finding ways to relocate their subway services above ground to ensure service. Persistent deforestation has contributed to shifting weather patterns causing severe, prolonged droughts, regional water shortages, and unrest. Water scarcity is on the global agenda, with many cities having run out of potable water; now turning to ocean-based desalinization facilities and large-scale infrastructure systems to counteract water shortages. In attempting to preserve humanities lifestyle, we have turned nature into an adversary who is now striking climactic blows that coastlines cannot defend. ●

CHALLENGING CURRENT AND FUTURE LEADERS TO SHAPE A BETTER WORLD SINCE 1947.

www.SalzburgGlobal.org

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3D Printing Concrete for a Sustainable Architecture Today’s architects leverage the lessons of efficiency through complex geometries. Materialized using 3D print technologies, architects create harmonious human habitats that bring the world closer to a sustainable construction industry.

By Ana Anton

W

hen people think of concrete, they immediately envision apartment blocks with their rectangular uniform-grid facades and minimalist living spaces.

Large infrastructures, like concrete dams, highways, tunnels, and bridges might also come to mind often cutting through natural landscapes and creating barriers inside ecosystems.

Concrete is, by far, the most utilized and engineered-material in the world.

The reasons for its ubiquity in the construction industry comes not only from a seemingly abundance as a resource and the minimal cost of its raw materials, but also from its compressive strength and durability.

A Controversial Material Economic incentives spur mass productivity and massive amounts of concrete. An estimated 4.1 billion metric tons of concrete worldwide is poured into formworks with a limited scope for taking on new shapes or conserving resources. At present,

no material exists that can replace concrete in terms of its long-term efficiency, structural performance, thermal behavior, and formability.

However, industry leaders and environmentalists alike concede the unsustainability of concrete. Indeed, the concrete industry is a major CO2 producer; however, problems arise not from the material itself, but from the vast quantities used. Sand, a seemingly endless resource, is much more limited than people think. Raw material suppliers in the construction industry excavate the type of sand suitable for making cement from rivers, lakes, and coastal areas. The nature of how the construction industry currently uses concrete results in over dimensioned structures and massively cast elements.

Shape is Cheap & Material Expensive As prominent biomaterials scientist, Julian Vincent stated more than 30 years ago, in nature, “shape is cheap and material expensive.” Nevertheless, J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 16

until recently the opposite held true for the majority of construction techniques. In the case of concrete, intricate forms could be produced at the expense of labor-intensive formworks homogenously filled without any performance driven shape differentiation.

Computation and digital fabrication tools place architects and the construction industry in a unique position to materialize large-scale complex forms that were previously impossible to conceive just a few years ago, let alone fabricate.

Additive manufacturing, with its 3D printing sub-field, promises to enable affordable fabrication of customized building components that incorporate geometric complexity, speed in fabrication, and economy of materials.

In this context, “concrete 3D printing” stands out as one of the fastest growing 3D print technologies to date.

Printing speeds reach up to 600 millimeters per second and allow continuous printing of a 30

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Opening performance of Concrete Choreography with Dancer Riikka Läser in Riom, Switzerland.

Photo by Benjamin Hofer.

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design components that are hollow, lighter and functionally hybridized.

Through an experimental driven methodology, they test ideas and develop one-to-one prototypes that help identify the challenges of upscaling our technology.

Concrete Choreography As a case study, the “Concrete Choreography” project shows, for the first time, the applicability of the concrete 3D printing processes developed at ETH Zurich for largescale production. Setting the stage for the Scientifica fair in Zurich, Switzerland and the Origin Festival of Culture in Riom—a small village in the eastern part of Switzerland, architectural students designed, fabricated, and installed nine unique pillars. Testing the limits of our fabrication process, the team record was to continuously 3D print a three-meter-tall (nearly 10 feet) column in just one hour and 50 minutes.

Interior structure of a Concrete Choreography column, during the 3D printing process, Robotic Fabrication Laboratory at ETH Zurich.

Photo by Keerthana Udaykumar.

centimeter-diameter hollow cylinder at a height of two meters in under 30 minutes.

Reinventing Creativity Through Digitalization Controlling concrete as part of a digital fabrication process opens up new opportunities for architects and engineers to create materially lean buildings that eliminate expensive formwork and deliver on the promise of full design customization.

The concrete 3D printing process at ETH Zurich—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—is developed as a collaboration between the academic chairs of Digital Building Technologies and Physical Chemistry of Building Materials to investigate tectonic principles for novel building elements. The awareness of using less material instigates novel design opportunities unexplored so far in concrete. By innovating material formulation, fabrication speed, assembly strategies, and structural performance, students research and J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 18

Developing design methods simultaneously with the fabrication parameters, proved that ambitious designs can stimulate technological advancement. Direct 3D printing of structural and non-structural building elements will take the industry one-step closer to a durable and sustainable construction industry.

This novel materialization of concrete contributes to a body of work aligned with Vincent’s description of material efficiency inside the natural form.

Exploring the potential of complex geometries, encourages the use of novel technologies to aid in the understanding and creation of harmonious urban human habitats with the same level of sophistication and lean material use as those encountered in nature. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ana Anton is a doctoral candidate in the chair for Digital Building Technologies at ETH Zurich and associated to the National Center for Competence in Research— Digital Fabrication, where she leads the research in concrete 3D printing. Her current research focuses on robotic concrete extrusion processes for largescale building components.

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Imagining Reality

By Robert Sumner

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ost people would view my childhood neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida as a stereotypical element in the suburban America story. Not true! In the mind’s eye of my 12-year-old self, it was anything but plain. Instead of trees, I saw rocket ships waiting to blast off. My neighbor mowing his lawn appeared to me as a robotic sentry patrolling the spaceport. Best of all, and long before the movie, my toys seemed to come to life as living companions that accompanied me and my friends as we embarked on our epic adventures. I lived in the most exciting neighborhood in the United States!

Today, as a 44-year-old adult, I find the realm of imagination even more exciting. We are approaching a turning point in technology that will allow the characters that I imagined as a child to step outside of my head and into the real world, ready to join me on my next adventure. How is this possible? Several sophisticated technologies that amplify each other are all simultaneously reaching maturity. Tech developers will soon deliver augmented reality ubiquitously using see-through glasses that utilize light field displays and computer vision for tracking, localization, and 3D reconstruction. New humancomputer interfaces will allow natural interfaces for digital content creation.

Rendered in the cloud, developers will deliver this content using highbandwidth low-latency 5G networks.

Machine learning methods will process

sensor data to provide semantic scene understanding, while deep neural networks will empower speech recognition for natural language interfaces. Maturing artificial intelligence will allow interaction with intelligent digital characters, as if they were real beings. Finally, intelligent story technology will support narrative driven stories, blended into real-world surroundings that adapt to a user’s actions.

Together with my team at the ETH Game Technology Center, we are doing our part to contribute to this vision. Our work on “Sketch Abstractions” allows a novice to create 3D animated characters from simple sketches. After drawing stick-figure legs, a rounded body, a pointy tail, triangular wings, and a rough head, our system understands and interprets the crude drawing and transforms it into an animated, flying dragon. Draw the legs extra-long, add two heads, and perhaps five triangles, and the system will immediately deliver a two-headed, extra tall, five-winged beast! Artists can create new character templates by authoring the 3D models and defining the associated sketching language.

With “PuppetPhone,”we focus on novel interactions in augmented reality by transforming digital characters into animated puppets that users can manipulate naturally using the physical movement of a smart phone. We embed a digital character into the real world using J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 20

augmented reality on a smart phone.

With our new puppet-interaction metaphor, when the user taps and holds on the screen, the digital character virtually attaches to the phone with an invisible rigid bar. The character directly mimics any physical movement of the phone. However, rather than simply moving like a rag doll, we interpret the user’s gestures and enhance the character movement with semantically relevant animation.

Thus, the character walks or runs across the table as the phone is moved. By tilting the phone forward, the character crouches, and by moving it upward, the character jumps. We even created a snowy scene where the user can encourage

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Photo courtesy of ETH Zurich & Disney Research.

the puppet character to roll large balls of snow and assemble them into a snowman—all with simple, natural gestures. Of course, the snowman also comes to life to join the user on their next adventure.

Our work on “Emergent Play” goes even further to explore character intelligence and the interaction between real-world play and intelligent virtual characters. We created a digital character visualized in the real world using augmented reality. Our system uses machine learning to recognize and semantically identify objects in the world. A natural language interfaces allows the user to speak to the character, and speech synthesis allows the character to

speak back. We show the potential of novel play patterns enabled by this technology with a simple safari animal scene. Our augmented reality system visualizes a 3D animated character standing amongst a collection of plastic safari animal toys. A child can speak to the digital character and ask him to point to the giraffe. Because of the machine learning and artificial intelligence of the system, the character will immediately comply.

The child can also ask the character to walk over to the elephant. The character walks there. However, when asking to walk to the lion, the character refuses, saying, “No, I’m afraid of the lion!” Of course, he is afraid, what intelligent digital character wouldn’t be!

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These examples are just a few of the ways we are moving toward an era of intelligent augmented reality characters. Our group is not alone.

Academic research labs as well as the world’s biggest tech giants are all working at a staggering pace to build the tools, algorithms, and applications that will contribute to this vision. In short, we should all brace ourselves for an amazing future where our imaginations create the reality around us. ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robert Sumner is the Associate Director of Disney Research Zurich and Scientific Director of the Game Technology Center at ETH Zurich where he teaches and conducts research in game technology, computer animation, and augmented reality for science and education.

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How a Walk on the Beach Will Help You Understand Quantum Computing

By Jonathan Home

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nticipating tremendous potential, big tech companies and governments are scrambling to be the first to build quantum computing devices. Unlike today’s computers that play only by the rules of classical physics, quantum computing promises a “silver bullet” solution for tasks deemed “incomputable.” This excitement adds to a sustained fascination for quantum physics since its origins more than 100 years ago. Even today, a claim in a paper published in a scientific journal about fundamental quantum waves (or particles) has a good chance of making it into the daily news cycle.

This ongoing interest stems from the fact that quantum mechanics lies outside of our personal experience of the natural world and contains philosophically challenging notions that spark debates—even among experts. The current interest in society demands that researchers convey the inner workings of quantum computers through terms in which the public can relate. However, physicists see the abstract world through the lens of mathematical structures—a language not easily translated to a layperson.

a single point in space, “the dog is on the chair,” for example. We intrinsically understand objects (or particles) because we encounter them in our everyday lives.

We also encounter waves, but their use in quantum mechanics is a little different to the waves that we encounter in our daily experience of life. One of the most beautiful mental images we can create for ourselves is one of an ocean wave gently rolling onto a beach. As the wave rolls in, we can observe that its motion extends all the way down the beach and it is not localized at any single point. As a second visualization, you may also have observed how, as waves rush in, the seawater navigates its way around the rocks. Sometimes, when the water meets at a single point, all at once it surges up into a big spray. If you can imagine these scenes at the beach, you now have a feeling for “wave interference.” In terms of water waves, “interference” means that a lot of water turned up in one place

Riding the Swell The conveyance of abstract information via imagery in a way that connects people on a personal level often lies within the realm of artistic expression. Art serves as a visual association of analogous concepts. So, how can we envision quantum physics and quantum computers? For quantum mechanics, two concepts are of key importance. The first is that of particles. These are objects located at J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 22

having taken multiple different paths. In quantum physics, however, observing a big wave means that the probability of finding an object at that position is high. A big splash means that the object (or “particle”) is almost certain to be discovered within the splash. If the splash happens in a single location, we can then recover a particle, because we are certain that we will find the object at one point in space.

The Answer is in the Splash How do waves relate to the function of a quantum computer? Well, in a classical computer (like the one on your desk), there is an organized set of rules. Much like a calculator, classical computers are programmed with a sequence of “yes,” “no,” and “if-then” types of expressions that tell the system to execute certain processes. At any one time, the classical computer is in a fixed configuration (for example labeled by a very long number), and the

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sequence tells the computer to jump between different configurations.

We can view this as a space, where each configuration exits at a particular point in space labeled by its number.

The classical computer is then an object that jumps between the different points as the program runs. The number it ends up with is the answer to a problem. Classical computers can also operate by starting at a point that is chosen randomly with some probability (some algorithms find this useful), but they always jump from point to point to point.

The quantum computer is inherently different. In some sense, it manages to occupy all configurations at the same time. It does this by assigning a small probability to each point or configuration, but in quantum physics these probabilities are linked together in a wave-like relationship—much like the relationship that connects all of the water as it rides up the beach.

On its own this seems useless, since if we ask the question, “At what point are you?” we get a completely random answer. To make a quantum computer powerful we must instead obtain a specific answer with a very high

probability. To do this, an algorithm designer specifies how to make all the different parts of the wave “travel” down different paths (around all of the rocks at the beach), and then combines the parts again to resulting in interference—a huge splash at a single point in space. If the programmer did the job correctly, the quantum computer “splash” would then select out a single point— the answer to the problem it is trying to solve. Quantum computers thus rely upon wave-like behavior and extract relationships between possibilities. It is no coincidence; therefore, that the heart of many quantum algorithms often involves finding relationships in mathematics. The applications are real and have a significant impact— we anticipate, for example, that quantum computers will break the current cryptographic methods that we use for bank and internet security.

The Beauty of the Wave The wave property also makes it challenging to build quantum computers. Quantum computers are highly sensitive to anything that disrupts the careful wave relationship 23

that connects the whole of the device.

We call this noise, although it does not have to be related to sound—even electrical signals emanating from power lines could constitute noise. Fortunately, theoretical physicists have provided tools that overcome noise disturbances in the form of a beautiful set of ideas that are also intrinsically connected to quantum wave interference and correlations. Realizing these ideas requires greatly improved control of much larger systems than we can currently build. When we get to that point; however, we will finally be able to take full advantage of the quantum world and uncover not just new capabilities in physics, but also apply them to real-world problems.

I hope that for all of us, playing and exploring these systems will enable us to understand the essence and beauty of quantum mechanics. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jonathan Home is a professor for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on investigations of quantum state engineering and computing with trapped atomic ions. A particular focus, at present, is scaling these systems up through the use of quantum error correction to protect fragile quantum states.

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Creating Living Machines

By Roland Siegwart

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ften used synonymously with artificial intelligence, robots possess a tangible form that distinguishes the field of robotics from AI. Embodied, robots present an unrivaled and rich set of potential interactions within a human environment. Their tangible form makes robots exponentially more complex than the AI tools used in data analytics, for example.

It is also the reason for the slower progressionin robotics research and development.

Creating Common Sense Similar to humans, intelligent and interactive robots have to perceive their environment using basic human, albeit electronic, senses— sight, sound, smell, touch, and even electronic tongues that can taste. Designed to interact with their environment in useful and efficient ways, robots can respond gently, with extended dexterity, or sometimes with a superhuman like forcefulness. Developers today design robots in such a way that their movements support specific intentions—such as search and rescue operations or industrial inspection. They also design to elicit human emotion. Creating robots that interact seamlessly within a human environment poses a very demanding and challenging task that requires both highly interdisciplinary and creative teams. It is only the appropriate combination and integration of appearance, sensing, intelligence, and interaction that will render a robot truly interactive.

As Natural as a Hummingbird As humans interact with the world, we rely heavily on tactical and forcecontrolled movements performed intuitively and naturally. In fact, nature has always served as an ideal model for solving complex human problems.

Today’s scientists, innovators, and engineers often rely on nature for inspiration. Researchers developing ETH Zurich’s ANYmal quadruped walking robot (Fig. 1) enhanced this robotic dog’s leg motors with a spring (Fig. 2). The spring absorbs the energy in each of ANYmal’s steps the same as human ankle joints and tendons absorb energy as we take a step forward or walk down steps. The deflection of the spring also measures the precise contact force of the robot—a crucial measurement for tactile interaction. This concept, inspired by nature, ensures ANYmal’s motors operate much the

Figure 1: ANYmal, the walking quadruped with “soft” actuators Image courtesy of ETH Zurich.

Figure 2: Concept of serial elastic actuation of a walking robot inspired by nature. Image courtesy of ETH Zurich.

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same as human muscles and the spring in human tendons work. It proved to render a more adaptive, robust, and efficient gait for this walking robot.

Similarly, the wonderful flight capacities of hummingbirds that flap their wings at about 80 times per second, inspired

ETH Zurich robotics researchers to create, Voliro. Like a hummingbird that flies up, down, right, left, backwards, and even upside down all while collecting nectar, Voliro too is capable of omnidirectional flight. This extremely agile multicopter is also the first built for physical interaction with its environment. The drone hovers in any arbitrary orientation including upside down using its tilting arms. This novel drone research opens up a new world of interactivity and accessibility to places far from human reach (Fig. 3).

Interactive Art

Figure 3: The Voliro drone taking measurements with a contact sensor on a chimney. Image courtesy of ETH Zurich.

Most art, from ancient to modern times, consists of motionless moments in time rendered in paint or stone.

Robotics offers the emotional connectivity of moving and interactive systems. Pioneering artists in residence at Wyss Zurich, Aparna Rao and Søren Pors explore how animatronics suggest responsive behaviors in animated objects.

Embedding artists in a translational research center, one in which robotics represents an important focus, enables creative solutions that may not occur in the highly disciplined and logical minds of excellent mechanical

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engineers. The walking canvases, part of project PATHOS, illustrate the high degree of nuance in robotic animation.

Specifically, the canvases demonstrate how life-like animatronics suggest the complex inner emotional states of inanimate objects making this a spontaneous and personalized medium of expression. The canvases make their public debut in ETH Zurich’s exhibition in Davos during the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2020.

Nature and experimentation with robots guide us in creating “living” machines that embody a rich and diverse interaction far beyond artificial intelligence trapped in computers and the cloud. The rich potential for motion capabilities that makes robots so fascinating, and sometimes a bit scary, presents a wonderful challenge for creativity, research, and design. ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Roland Siegwart is a professor for autonomous mobile robots at ETH Zurich and founding co-director of the Wyss Zurich. He is currently Head of ETH Zurich’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems. Siegwart also studied mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich, spent ten years as a professor at EPFL Lausanne, and held visiting positions at Stanford University and NASA Ames.

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Three Challenges in Rendering Next Generation Robots

By Stelian Coros

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etting the record straight, Stelian Coros deconstructs some common challenges in advancing robotics. He reveals the realities and challenges of robotics research, and offers an exciting outlook on the evolution of robots with human-like capabilities.

Challenge 1: Robots must become as skilled as humans.

Humans are extremely dexterous.

They produce fluid, expressive, and complex movements. They can handle delicate objects effortlessly. Humans also have the ability to develop new skillsets by training and refining these movements. Take, for example, professional puppeteers. Through repetition and application, they bring marionettes to life. Utilizing creative skills, they imagine how best to recreate a movement that accurately portrays a particular character or an animal. In close collaboration with ETH Zurich, computer animators and graphic designers working with Disney Research Zurich closely study the movements of people and animals in their natural environments, in order to recreate realistic scenes and animate lifelike characters. Robots, on the other hand, still have quite a long way to go before they can match the level of dexterity and skill that we see in people. Yet, if robots are to be useful in the real world, society expects robotic technologies to perform on par with human-like capabilities.

Currently, my team in the Computational Robotics Lab

studies complex human motions, like the example of the puppeteer, to understand how we can program robots to grasp the physical behaviors of such systems. By imagining how to animate marionettes robotically, we can model some of these motions and determine how to optimize movements. At the ETH Zurich Pavilion in Davos, Switzerland during the 2020 World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting, we debut the PuppetMaster—a physics-based motion-planning framework for robotic animation of marionettes.

We also reveal our mathematical model that forms the basis of a general unified framework enabling optimization algorithms to infer concurrently a robot puppeteer’s workspace, movements, control, and dynamic motions.

Challenge 2: Robots will change the world of work, but to the benefit of society.

Why are we interested in robots that can recreate human movements?

The reason lies in potential real-world applications that might free up human labor for more skilled jobs, such as in hospitals or hotels where robots might be able to clean rooms and make beds.

Mail sorting facilities with their automated pipelines are another example. In today’s modern postal facilities, letters and boxes fly through robotically assisted sorting centers at great speed. However, the changing nature of shopping and the advent of online offers across the world means that even the shape of packaging is J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 26

evolving. Instead of standard shaped envelopes and boxes, mail systems now deal with soft and oddly shaped packages as well.

Today, mail centers still need to hire people to deal with non-standard packaging, as opposed to installing robots. When a crumpled package needs to be picked up, unfolded, and placed back on a conveyor belt with the label face up, today’s robots have neither the ability to react to such a situation, nor the skills to deal with it.

We are a long way off from the day in which robots will be able to manipulate such objects—even in jobs that appear to be simple and repetitive like mail sorting, cleaning, or making beds. Our challenge in the end is to make sure we find a balance.

One day, as they become increasingly skilled, robots will be able to improve quality of life for people who require assistive care, for example. Smart robots will be able to ensure that our society operates efficiently, allowing creative jobs that require more skills and experience to remain in human hands. Mundane or dangerous tasks will go to robots, and overall that will improve society.

Challenge 3: Robots must learn how to work alongside other robots and people.

Robots excel at performing identical and repetitive jobs. While robots can move with super-human skill, strength, and precision, they can only repeat the precise motions for which they were programmed. In contrast, even at a

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The PuppetMaster. Images courtesy of ETH Zurich.

young age, children have the ability to adapt to a very dynamic environment with a multitude of other actors.

Adaptation is something that robots are very bad at doing. We are trying to overcome such limitations in our research at ETH Zurich. We simply do not have the technology to instill human-like reasoning and interaction in robotics technologies—at least not at this time. As soon as they are required to react or adapt to changes in their environment, robots are just not up to the task. This is why the foundation of our work starts with a robot like the PuppetMaster, because this already requires an advanced level of understanding of the physical behavior of complex everyday objects, such as marionettes.

Considering how robots interact with each other and with humans forms the basis for advancing robotics research

to the next level. We see a huge potential for human-robot collaboration in resolving complex tasks more efficiently in the future. The groundwork we lay with the PuppetMaster will enable us to move on to challenges that are more aspirational.

These are just a few of the incredible challenges that inspire our daily research. My research team aims to endow robots with human-level dexterity when it comes to manipulating complex physical systems. We want to give robots the ability to process a problem and come up with a suitable solution. We have already achieved, to some extent, the ability for a robot (Skaterbot) to teach itself how to skate.

In the long-term, we anticipate creating robots with a capacity to predict reactions, to exercise a certain degree of creativity, and to come up with optimal responses. By drawing inspiration from

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what people do in everyday activities and endowing robots with these abilities, our society stands to benefit greatly. Smart robots are not something we need to fear, rather, if we do it the right way, it is something that we should embrace. In due course, robots will be capable of handling complex objects, interacting with actors including other robots and people, and evolving to adapt to everyday situations. Let the robot-learning journey begin! â—?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stelian Coros is an Assistant Professor of Computational Robotics at ETH Zurich.

Coros works at the nexus of visual computing, robotics, and computational fabrication in the university’s Computer Science Department.

He also maintains an adjunct professor appointment in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Introducing The Great Powers and Urbanization Channel

By Ian Klaus

the return of great power politics and continuing urbanization are not separate phenomena. Cities have become the economic engines and sites of innovation for nation-states, as well as targets for surveillance and cyber-attacks for national governments.

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INTRODUCING O THE GREAT POWERS AND URBANIZATION CHANNEL

ver the course of the early twenty-first century, global economic and demographic trends have increased the relative importance of urban spaces, while cities themselves have organized collectively in the face of transnational challenges. But while urban populations, areas and economies expand, and mayors continue their move into the international arena, that arena itself has been shifting. China has arrived as a great power. Russia has opened anew old questions and challenged long-standing norms. The United States has retreated on the global stage. Domestic politics in the United States and Europe have undermined long-standing relationships.

By: Ian Klaus

These two developments—the return of great power politics and continuing urbanization—are not separate phenomena. Cities have become the economic engines and sites of innovation for nation-states, as well as targets for surveillance and cyberattacks for national governments.

Successful powers in the twenty-first century will build stable and innovative cities at home while projecting influence, and at times military strength, in urban settings abroad.

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Successful powers in the twenty-first century will build stable and innovative cities at home while projecting influence, and at times military strength, in urban settings abroad.

However, most conversations about the return of great power politics ignore urban dynamics, dismissing references to urbanization or cityfocused efforts as naively postWestphalian. Meanwhile, most urban debates, focused as they are on urban dynamics such as planning, public space, and service delivery, proceed with little time for geopolitical trends at the nation-state level. International relations scholars and urbanists, as well as diplomats and mayors, still often operate in worlds apart.

This Channel will bring them together.

A collaboration between the Diplomatic Courier and the Great Powers and Urbanization Project—a joint initiative of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the University of

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Melbourne’s Connected Cities Lab, the Barcelona Center for International Affairs, and the Argentine Council for International Relations—the Channel will offer a one stop shop for national security officials and urbanists alike trying to navigate global challenges in an urban world.

Of course, great powers and hegemons have long sought to influence the shape and scale of cities far beyond their borders. The urban ruins of the Roman Empire stretch to Northern England and the Middle East. The infrastructure and drainage projects of the British Empire continue to give shape to New Delhi and Mumbai. The magistrales, metro-stops and massive housing projects of the Soviet Union continue to provide transportation and housing in the former Eastern Bloc.

“Design was not a marginal aspect of the Cold War but central,” argued David Crowly and Jane Pavitt, “to the competition over the future.”

If the Cold War has not exactly returned, geopolitical tension most certainly has. Like global powers before it, China is influencing urban spaces beyond its borders. Just as the form of “global city” that developed in the late twentieth century was a product of

a historically distinctive set of relations between international system, state, city, and market, so now does the emerging Belt and Road City have the potential to signal a very different set of these relations in the early to mid-twenty-first century.

The consequences of great power competition ripple far beyond the national and municipal borders of the powers themselves. The return of geopolitics—and with it shifts in patterns of globalization—have particular importance for nation-states such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates that are highly dependent culturally and economically on the interconnectivity of their cities with the wider world.

The early twenty-first century has seen an explosion of “city-diplomacy” on the global stage. Cities are playing a role in shaping the foreign policies of some great powers and are building their international engagement capacities, pushing the boundaries of their legal authorities vis-à-vis national authorities, shifting the politics of compliance and enforcement of international law, taking new seats at the tables of global governance, and altering the structures of international institutional engagement.

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Nonetheless, as Simon Curtis put it bluntly in his award winning Global Cities and Global Order, “The reemergence of the city from the long shadow of the state in the late twentieth century was facilitated by the state itself.” Though differing in their methodologies and analysis, the work of Paul Hirst, Charles Maier, Saskia Sassen, and Goran Therborn align with Curtis on a fundamental matter: the direction of the nation-state will be crucial to the direction of cities, and that includes the relations between nation-states.

Michel Foucault observed that a “whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time be a history of powers (both of these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat.” To the degree that the little tactics of habitat and the great strategies of geopolitics are now overlapping, you will find that shared space explored by historians, urbanists, planners, economists and practitioners here in this Channel. ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ian Klaus is Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was previously Senior Adviser for Global Cities at the U.S. Department of State.

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CITIES IN A WORLD OF STATES By: Charles S. Maier

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International politics, for policy makers, for theorists, and for historians has traditionally comprised the world of states.

When thinkers from these disciplines analyze that world, they often invoke “geopolitics,” a vague but supposedly tough-minded analysis taking into account national resources, geography, objectives, and strategy.

Geopolitics—a concept developed

by Scandinavian, German, British, and American theorists as international rivalries heated up toward 1900—was the language that serious men (and the term dripped with gender) used to envisage global conflict. But what scope did it leave for cities as autonomous actors in international politics? Did they matter? Do they matter today? In what ways do they enter into that world of states?

The city is usually considered as a conglomeration or nexus within the state and not as a geopolitical entity in its own right—exception made for so-called city-states or urban republics in Antiquity or the Renaissance. The Great Powers and Urbanization Channel represents an effort to problematize that assumption, that is to explore what elements of agency cities maintain J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 32

No matter how small or massive, states exist in a legal realm where they enjoy formal equality and freedom of action, unless they have voluntarily ceded partial sovereignty to an overarching authority. within the international system or the world of states.

The state is a bounded territorial unit that exists in a world of sovereign peers.

The language of sovereignty, encoded in international law, has been developing since the 16th and 17th centuries: Francisco de Vitoria, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo Grotius made fundamental contributions. No matter how small or massive, states exist in a legal realm where they enjoy formal equality and freedom of action, unless they have voluntarily ceded partial sovereignty to an overarching authority such as the European Union. The UN General Assembly currently includes over 190 such sovereign units.

The city can represent the site of government in a state; but the city

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is also a nodal geographical conglomeration created by economic pressures (production and labor recruitment; exchange with markets; a site for precarious livelihood when agricultural producers become surplus labor). The city traditionally nurtures cultural opportunities: theatre, music, a press. It provides sociability for youth and adults through special institutions (schools, pubs, clubs) as well as everyday mixing on the street.

It provides a sensory environment that is familiar and can be exciting. The city, so long as it retains some degree of economic viability and cultural vitality, is one of the great achievements of human civilization.

As Samuel Johnson said about his city, he who tires of London tires of life.

Cities have evolved out of political or economic forces, or eventually a mixture of both. Some early modern and even 18th and 19th century cities developed as creations to service a state that grew bureaucratically and administratively, e.g. Constantinople, Naples, Edo (Tokyo), or Saint Petersburg. Others developed rapidly as a product of the emerging commercial and industrial revolution, e.g. New York, Manchester, Chicago, Buenos Aires, Essen. And many

One important constant seems to be that cities are chronically underfunded with respect to the services they should provide such as transportation, health, provisioning, housing, and education. expanded out of a combination of political centralization and affiliated economic transformation: London, later Berlin, and Milan.

Successive waves of rural transformation (demographic increase, mechanization of agriculture, and the attrition of subsistence farming) sent traditional rural populations to work either on monocultural plantations (from 1650 to 1950) on the global and colonial frontiers or into urban barrios (since, say 1830 to the present).

For two centuries in Western Europe, Japan, and North America (1750-1950) the development of urban industry, construction, commerce, and services provided the opportunities for absorbing the in-migration, and indeed from the 1850s to 1950s or 1960s could ameliorate housing

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conditions and reverse the initial declines in urban life-span from such diseases as typhoid, cholera, or tuberculosis.

But change was hardly unidirectional.

Two dramatically different patterns have emerged. Rural “surplus� population has flowed to urban areas, often at a pace faster than the development of industry could absorb, finding employment, if at all, in casual labor, sweatshop production for Western clothing manufacturers, domestic service (also a major source of employment in the West before 1960-70), custodial tasks, peddling, security services, or the narcotics industry, and finding housing in shantytowns, favelas, and barrios.

In contrast, those cities that have successfully ridden the wave of digital technology in Asia have also massively increased in population, but with more societal cohesion. Or perhaps their societal cohesion facilitated their economic modernization.

States and territorialized capital thus created the cities twice over in modern times, first between, say, 1750 and 1950 and then again, for the global South, since 1950. But this fantastically transformative process

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did not confer geopolitical autonomy on the city. The economic city and the political offices of the bureaucratic state inhabited the same node within a territory.

This means that most cities—though perhaps not the pure administrative creations such as Brasilia or Canberra or even Washington— exist in an ambiguous or unresolved relationship with the states that encompass them. They are both the centers of state activity, even as their economic and cultural life retain autonomous sources of vitality. It seems to me that this tension of being quasi-encompassed must condition any aspiration for autonomous agency.

STATES maintain the capacity to wage war. They also maintain the capacity to legislate for cities within their borders and to restrict entry from other states.

There are other constraining factors.

Urban economies go through cycles: we tend to track bad and good eras for cities, e.g., New York in the 1970s versus New York since the 1990s. The lesson may be that it is impossible to specify a long-term equilibrium state for a city that is more than an outdoor museum.

Glitzy development can come at the

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expense of poorer, marginalized residents; decaying centers can find new sources of renewal. One important constant, however, seems to be that cities are chronically underfunded with respect to the services they should provide such as transportation, health, provisioning, housing, and education.

The needs of those who migrate to the city or grow old within its precincts tend to outrun the surplus that urban authorities can appropriate. Urban governance is thus constantly preoccupied by its own political and economic needs.

The question arises, therefore, whether and how our massive urban galaxies might play an international political role

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The Italian urban republics prospered as city states, although they did so by actively resisting a larger imperial or national structure. economic surplus by connections to other global cities (Singapore, the Emirates, Hong Kong, London, New York). Can these financial linkages, however, generate a genuinely autonomous political sphere? To put it picturesquely, might a United Cities convene next to the United Nations?

And how would it interact?

that takes account of their new weight in economy and society. Saskia Sassen’s “global cities” are those that have found a way to prosper by links with other global cities in the generation of financial capital. Their role reflects the growing proportion of finance to industry. They may exist within a carapace of law and supervision that their territorial state insists on, but that is not essential to their life and growth.

These cities can also generate an intellectual synergy that keeps them vital. They are product of a Castell’s “network society.” Whereas the classic industrial city existed in a symbiotic relationship to an agrarian hinterland (e.g. Chicago, Buenos Aires), the new “global city” creates its intellectual and

The geopolitical international order exists because states are multiple and fill the global surface. They maintain the capacity to wage war. They also maintain the capacity to legislate for cities within their borders and to restrict entry from other states. Nation-states achieved their status within a global order by claiming either an ethnic coherence or a military-imperial prominence, or, during the Cold War, an ideological mission that was territorially anchored. But can there exist a geopolitics of cities if they do not fill a global space, they do not raise armed forces, they cannot control the admission of new entrants, and their raison d’être of economic growth or progress should not necessarily be zero-sum? What would be the equivalent of the “national” or ethnolinguistic basis for the geopolitically active city? Indeed, can cities claim a true socio-political autonomy since both the decline of states and the instruments of modern warfare have often brought the depopulation of cities?

Nonetheless, history (and not just the history of Antiquity) certainly provides examples of urban sovereignty and autonomy. The Italian urban republics prospered as city states, although they did so by actively resisting a larger imperial or national structure. The Hanseatic League offered a different, partially confederal model. The Hansa cities acknowledged a political connection to the territorial unit in which they were contained, although that political unit, in particular the Holy

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Roman Empire, left the Hansa cities large scope for self-government. Their fabric consisted of economic regulation and interchange. Nonetheless, both the Renaissance urban republics and the Hanseatic League lost their autonomy to larger territorial claimants in the early modern era.

For better or worse, it seems to me that any geopolitical order based on cities must depend upon the partial dismantling of the territorial state order and thus of the notion of a unitary sovereignty as it developed from the Renaissance until very recently. Is that really plausible in an age when populist pressures are reinforcing national boundaries and concepts of ethnicity?

Even if we assume that current populist trends will ebb, the sovereign-state order is a tough structure to crack, and state urban future; I would suggest the idea of geo-governance. As political units in modern times, cities have largely developed within a state framework.

The idea of secession, is not really an alternative unless the contemporary state order dissolves. Even Norman Mailer during his Quixotic 1969 campaign for Mayor of New York, mooted secession only from the state of New York. Few cities can be Singapore.

Rather, I would suggest, notions of territorial sovereignty (and even shared spatial sovereignty as in the European Union) will have to give way to concepts of functional governance.

We have many examples of functional shared geospatial authority ranging from the 1995 Arctic Council internationally to the Port of New York Authority. These arrangements for shared governance will no doubt proliferate, and urban authorities can claim an enhanced role within them.

The future, I would wager, is not with cities displacing states or wiggling out of their embrace, but in the transformation of statehood itself. ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500.

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CITIES AND O INTERNATIONAL LAWYERS NEED TO START TALKING TO ONE ANOTHER

ver the past decade, cities have quickly assumed a place on the global stage. From the Chicago Climate Charter, signed by mayors of more than 50 cities, to immigration debates raging around the world, cities are meaningfully influencing global political discourse. Yet, international law—the primary system of norms, rules, and institutions through which the international order has been constructed—has remained off limits to cities and other non-state actors. The result is a disconnect between cities’ growing role in global affairs and their continued exclusion from the formal structures of the international system.

By: William Burke-White

The disconnect between cities and international law should not be surprising. The international legal system has always been a system of nation states. Emerich de Vattel’s famous treatise from 1758 is titled Le Droit de Gens (The Law of Nations) and its subtitle makes clear that the system is based on the “principles of the law of nature applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns.” The ticket for admission to the international legal system was then, and remains today, sovereignty —the full right to govern without outside interference. Nation states J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 36

The disconnect between cities and international law should not be surprising. The international legal system has always been a system of nation states. alone enjoy such sovereignty. Cities, as subordinate actors within a state, do not. Hence cities have been excluded from the formal institutions of the international order.

While the formal rules of participation in international law have led international organizations, national governments, and the international lawyers in their employ to overlook cities, cities have quietly become important actors in international legal processes. Cities contribute to international norm development and enact policies that promote (or impede) rule compliance.

Cities’ commitments in the Chicago Climate Charter, for example, may well do more to shape climate norms than the proclamations of some heads of state. City implementation of low carbon transportation options or favorable building codes may make a greater contribution to meeting the

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2°C goal than some state-level policy choices. The incorporation of an international human rights agreement into municipal legislation or cities’ voluntary self-reporting of SDG compliance to the UN may have a more direct impact on rights enjoyed by that city’s residents than would an equivalent national commitment. Cities’ commitments to the November 2019 Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace are an essential component of a broad coalition of actors needed to fill a troubling governance gap. Today, the success or failure of international agreements may well turn on cities’ engagement in and compliance with them. Yet, the lawyers who make and implement the rules of the international system, usually on behalf of states, largely continue to ignore city actions, overlooking a critical component of the global governance architecture that could help advance international rule development and compliance.

Despite cities’ growing impact in global politics, mayors and municipal authorities have yet to find their voice in the international legal system. Cities are only just beginning to develop capacities and expertise in international law or international institutional engagement. When cities do participate

Despite cities’ growing impact in global politics, mayors and municipal authorities have yet to find their voice in the international legal system. in international negotiations, they are usually relegated to the outer-most ring of concentric circles of meetings and dialogues as representatives of civil society, not formal participants. Even at a conference about cities—Habitat III, for example—cities themselves were part of an external engagement process by states, rather than negotiators themselves.

Moreover, the connective fabrics that could link the traditional, formal architecture of international law to cities and other sub-state actors is significantly underdeveloped. Groups of cities frequently make proclamations from outside the formal negotiations, such as that of the 5th Mayoral Forum on Human Mobility, Migration and Development on the sidelines of the Intergovernmental Conference on the Global Compact for Save Orderly and Regular Migration, hoping they will be heard by the actual state negotiators “in

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the room where it happened.” Nowhere was this better illustrated than at the 2018 Buenos Aires U20, immediately preceding the G20 summit. Despite the support of the host Government of Argentina and the City of Buenos Aires, the Communique of the U20, theoretically a “roadmap to the G20 leaders” did little to inform formal international policymaking in the G20 Leaders’ Declaration. If cities want to actually influence international rule development and harness the power of international law to advance their own municipal interests on issues of global affairs, they need to operate in the domain of international law with the help of international lawyers.

Four shifts are required to bridge this gap between city policies and international law.

First, mindsets must change. Cities need to recognize that they will be more effective contributors to global governance if they speak the language of international law and that by harnessing international law they can advance their own local agendas.

On the other side of the divide, international lawyers must recognize that cities can and do make a difference in rule creation and compliance.

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Second, new capabilities are needed.

Cities need to build expertise and experience in international law, whether in their solicitor generals’ offices or in international affairs departments. New York, Los Angeles, and London have taken important strides in this respect and other cities would benefit from following their lead. International lawyers need to understand cities’ authorities, jurisdictional reach, and potential governance contributions.

Third, cities and international institutions need to work together to build better connective fabrics linking city policy activities and international rule-making and compliance efforts.

Such connective fabrics could include new formal and informal relationships, creative new forms of membership and participation, and direct inclusion of city actions/commitments in formal international agreements. The decision by the UN to accept a voluntary local review of SDG compliance from New York City is a potentially promising new model to directly connect local governance and international institutional processes.

Fourth, and perhaps most radically, the formal rules of international law may need to adapt overtime to the growing role of cities in global politics.

Traditional international legal formalism that limits participation to sovereign states may need to

The decision by the UN to accept a voluntary local review of SDG compliance from New York City is a potentially promising new model to directly connect local governance and international institutional processes. accommodate other actors, such as cities, in a more meaningful way. One approach would be to give cities a limited, but formal voice—what lawyers might call conditional international legal personality—to the degree that and within the substantive domains in which cities can make meaningful functional contributions to solving global policy challenges.

For example, in an international climate negotiation considering the impact of urban transport policies cities would have a legal voice commensurate with their ability to advance the climate governance agenda. Similarly, in a human rights treaty compliance discussion on police brutality, cities would have a loud voice. In contrast, in a nuclear arms or international trade negotiation, cities legal personality would be far more circumscribed, remaining subordinate to a national government.

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As cities and international lawyers start to talk to one another, both will benefit, as will the collective effort to address global policy challenges.

Cities can influence global norms by engaging with the international legal system directly, particularly where their policy preferences diverge from those of their national authorities. So too, cities can harness the existing power of international law as political and legal leverage to advance their own local agendas.

International lawyers and international institutions will find urgently needed political will— too often lacking among national governments today—in the world’s cities. At a moment when the distribution of power and preferences among nation states is changing so rapidly, incorporating cities into the international legal system may well result in new, and perhaps unforeseen, geopolitical realignments among cities, states, and international institutions. It may even yield a new political force to shape international norms and, perhaps, a broader reimagination of the nature of international and transnational politics. ● ABOUT THE AUTHOR William Burke-White is Visiting Scholar at The Brookings Institution and Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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CITIES OF THE NEW SILK ROADS

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hina has embarked on a grand strategy to revitalize the ancient Silk Roads for the twenty-first century. This geopolitical play, known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), has prompted a frenzy of analysis in foreign policy and international relations circles. But while BRI has implications for great power politics, its more immediate effects will be felt in cities across Asia and the world. Massive investment in infrastructure development along land and maritime routes once laid down by the old Silk Roads is encouraging the emergence of new urban spaces in Gwadar City and Khorgos, while once renowned urban hubs like Astana and Kars are reemerging, and cities long thought to be a critical part of the liberal world order such as Hong Kong are undergoing their own metamorphosis.

By: Simon Curtis & Ian Klaus

In a new iteration of an old historical pattern, the strategic initiatives of great power states are shaping urban form. Driven by infrastructure development, Chinese finance, and a massive geopolitical gambit, these cities and urban areas will bear the unique features of twenty-first century globalization, and will be critical to the century’s unfolding politics.

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Driven by infrastructure development, Chinese finance, and a massive geopolitical gambit, these cities and urban areas will bear the unique features of twentyfirst century globalization, and will be critical to the century’s unfolding politics.

The BRI is the signature foreign policy initiative of President Xi’s stewardship of the Chinese Communist Party. It is the material component of Xi’s ‘China Dream’: a vision that sees China as the guiding force in a shared ‘community of human destiny’. And if the BRI realizes the ceilings of its grandiose ambitions in the coming decades it will significantly redraw the structures of international order and the world economy. The scale and ambition of the BRI means that if it is successful the globalization of the twenty-first century may well have Chinese characteristics.

To be sure, there are reasons to be skeptical of such a grand vision and adventure. But with an estimated

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eventual investment of over $1.5 trillion, and a projected completion date of 2049, it has the potential to redirect the forces of globalization at just the point where Western powers are seemingly losing faith in a project they have led since the end of World War II. As leading liberal powers such as the United States and United Kingdom have been turning inwards, building walls, and letting old alliances fray, China is reaching outwards, seeking to enroll new allies into the BRI (over 60 countries at present), and offering new narratives for an interconnected Eurasian centered world.

The ‘Belt’ and ‘Road’ is actually six economic corridors across Eurasia, and three maritime routes. These, together, are intended to form the material backbone of an interconnected system of transport, energy and digital infrastructure that would gradually develop into a large Eurasian common market, stretching from the Pacific to Europe. At its heart, it is a vision of a trading order in which China generates, redirects, and captures global supply chains.

One of the key ways in which visions of order and society are expressed and materialized is through urban form: through the design and

development of cities and the infrastructures that connect them across states and regions. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre famously observed that ‘(social) space is a ‘social’ product.’ This means, in part, that cities bear the imprint of the political philosophies and the economic models and processes that shape them. And those processes, whether they are to be found in U.S.-led or China-centered globalizations, draw on many different cultural and political worlds. Looking around his own city, the geographer Ed Soja once observed: ‘Everywhere seems also to be in Los Angeles.’ World orders, in other words, influence world cities. And emblematic cities (Rome, London, New York) go on to influence and shape world order in turn.

structure of an open, liberal global trading system, underpinned by U.S. financial power, organized via the set of international organizations set up at Bretton Woods after World War II, drawing strength from a deregulated form of finance capital, which they also directed and organized. We see in the state led creation of this type of global economy, the tight linkage between powerful states, international order and cities: the ‘global city’ emerged and thrived within a particular structure created and sustained by powerful states. We should expect to see just such a connection between China, the Belt and Road grand strategy, and the emerging Belt and Road Cities.

This is why understanding the relationship between grand strategy, geo-economics, and urban form will be essential to policy makers and scholars attempting to come to terms with the evolution of international order in the twenty-first century.

But what forms will such cities take? These are cities still finding their form, and subject to the flux and flow of geopolitics.

The Belt and Road City, both inside and outside of China, is likely to have very different features to the ‘Global Cities’ that have thrived during the U.S. led liberal global order. Those global cities emerged within the

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But we can offer some preliminary observations. Whereas the “Global City” emerged alongside the rise of finance, financial services, and the intermediary relationships needed to further such exchange, Belt and Road Cities appear to prioritize infrastructure, supply chain management, legal zoning techniques,

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and connectivity. And whereas the “Global City” was populated by, at least in part, a nomadic professional class, the Belt and Road City seems to prioritize the needs of Chinese nationals and firms. And, whereas the “Global City” coupled liberalism and increasing inequality, the Belt and Road City assumes for urban areas none of the freedoms that have long-been associated with cities.

But like the developing BRI, there is only so much we currently know about these emerging and reemerging cities. Though we have hints, we do not yet know what technological forms will be embedded in Belt and Road Cities and infrastructures. Nor do we know what values such cities might foment.

They may look very different to the cosmopolitan, open liberal global trading cities we have come to associate with the world order of the last decades. It will be crucial for policy makers to gain insight into the BRI as its material and ideational components evolve over the coming decade. Understanding the BRI, both theoretically and empirically, will be essential to any complete understanding of world order in the twenty first-century.

At its heart, the belt and road initiative is a vision of a trading order in which China generates, redirects, and captures global supply chains.

We might see the ongoing political upheavals in Hong Kong as emblematic of this underlying shift in world order. Hong Kong has been one of the preeminent global cities of the world economic arrangements of the last four decades. But today it may be viewed as a city poised between the (fraying) liberal trading world order and the emerging reality of the BRI. And as Hong Kong demonstrates, one feature of this friction between world orders will be the meeting of Beijing’s influence, with more popular, organic, and informal elements of urban spaces. As AbdouleMaliq Simone and Edgar Peterse recently noted in New Urban Worlds, “In city after city, no matter where, there is the surface veneer of rules and regulations, strategic plans and intersectoral arrangements...But J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 42

almost all cities are also sustained through substrates of improvised repair, compensation, off-the-book deals and tacit understandings.”

How will the urban forms and connections of Hong Kong morph and adapt to the emerging world of the BRI? What will it, and the other cities forming and changing along the routes of the ancient silk roads today, tell us about the evolving relationship between urbanization, great powers and world order? We have a unique opportunity to see world order in the making here. And, as Hong Kong reminds us, the most fascinating question of all may be how residents and civil society in these cities— new and old, pop-up, and historic— shape the development of their urban spaces in the years to come. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHORs Simon Curtis is a Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of East Anglia.

Ian Klaus is Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was previously Senior Adviser for Global Cities at the U.S. Department of State.

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editorial GLOBAL HEALTH

EDITORIAL: A CAN TECHNOLOGY SAVE HEALTHCARE? By: Garif Yalak

ccording to the United Nations, by 2050 the demographic shift will lead to 1.5 billion people being aged above 65. This will require the healthcare system to cover more multimorbidity diseases and elderly care, in addition to its already daunting tasks. Global healthcare costs have been at $7.7 trillion in 2017 and are predicted to reach $10 trillion in 2022.Additional trends of increasing population, higher life expectancy, environmental changes, health inequities, obesity, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), major disease outbreaks, and financial pressure on welfare systems put further tension on the current healthcare system.

All these factors lead to complex and multifaceted challenges, which can only be addressed in a coordinated approach by involving all stakeholders.

At the same time, with the emergence of digitization, new technologies, and applications are becoming available that can help address some of the pressing issues.

What needs to be done to harvest the full potential of these emerging technologies and applications?

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aims to reach this goal with several national initiatives including the Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) and the Electronic Patient Record (EPD). The goal is to connect all healthcare stakeholders—including research institutions—and enable the exchange of data to foster collaboration, innovation, and effective healthcare. These efforts will lay the foundation for a national healthcare network.

In our interconnected world where 58% of the world population has access to the internet, technology can help reduce the immense burdens on the healthcare system. The World Health Organization estimates a global shortage of 4.3 million healthcare workers. For instance, telehealth can help alleviate physicians’ shortage and meet increased patient demand, especially in remote areas where the shortage is acute. Remote areas and underserved regions can easily be covered via telemedicine applications reducing travel and hospitalization time.

Telemedicine can also be of great value to optimize access and improve the success rate of treatments in central areas. According to the Harvard

ReEd F i tUoGr iEaEl S GLOBAL HEALTH

The healthcare ecosystem is as complex as a Swiss watch, with many players, and many interests. One of the key drivers in healthcare today is technology.

Business Review and Accenture, virtual health can help save up to USD $10 billion in the U.S. alone, if used for just three cases: the annual patient visit, ongoing patient management, and self-care. Many doctors’ visits, including patient monitoring and medication adherence, can be covered via teleconsultations, reducing the tension on the institutions` limited onsite capacities. The technology and applications are available today.

ICT stakeholders are rushing into the healthcare sector and heavily investing in digital health solutions including digital coaches and trackers. The Mayo Clinic in the U.S., for example, is piloting Sensely, a decision support coach that collects data from wearables and sensors and analyzes it for the physician before the patient visit. Proteus developed the first-ever FDA approved “digital pill” containing an ingestible microsensor, which collects data during chemotherapy to increase adherence and outcome. Swiss-based SOPHiA GENETICS leverages the power of AI and data to improve treatment and various medical applications and is used by close to 1000 hospitals worldwide.

Other examples include smart lenses, pacemakers, and other implanted or ingested devices that can collect data

and notify doctors at the right time to intervene. However, for all these to work properly, there is a need for a stable and highly secure platform, as the foundation for the new applications.

Processes and operations need to be automated to free medical doctors and personnel to focus on delivering patient care. Time-consuming activities like tracking medical equipment, wheelchairs or even patients and doctors can be optimized by current IoT or location-based solutions. Simple sensor-based solutions can help reduce the waiting time of patients when they arrive or when certain results are available. Room cleaning or monitoring the current condition of medical equipment can be automated to only intervene when needed after a notification.

However, privacy concerns and cybersecurity threats in the healthcare environment are real. According to the HIPAA Healthcare Data Breach Report, more than 38 million individuals` healthcare records have been compromised in 2019 in the U.S. alone. In this regard, every health worker with access to medical data must have a proper education in cybersecurity and privacy. Another

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famous case dates back to 2013, when Vice President Dick Cheney`s Wi-Fi-connected pacemaker was removed and replaced without Wi-Fi out of fear of hackers. An educated workforce in cybersecurity and the right security solutions can help reduce risks of breaches.

The healthcare ecosystem is as complex as a Swiss watch, with many players, and many interests. One of the key drivers in healthcare today is technology. While it might not solve all above-mentioned problems, it can bring along new approaches. Combined with innovation, an enabled and educated workforce, a common vision, a national strategy aligned with global developments, and cross stakeholder collaboration technology can contribute to reducing the immense pressure on the healthcare system. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Garif Yalak is head of healthcare and education, country digital acceleration for Cisco Switzerland.

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rethinking education an inside look at wise A Special Report by Allyson Berri

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Her Highness Sheika Moza bint Nasser.

RETHINKING I EDUCATION: AN INSIDE LOOK AT WISE

t was an organization that started with a vision to inspire others to action; it ultimately created a global movement. It is rooted in a larger aspiration to diversify the economy in the tiny Middle Eastern peninsula where it was founded; today, its global community brings together education stakeholders from over 200 countries.

When it was founded, its current CEO, Stavros Yiannouka says the goal was to build “the Davos of education.” And much like the annual Swiss meetings, which convene to discuss the state of the global economy, the World Summit for Education (WISE) has become the premier stage for educational innovation.

By: Allyson Berri

WISE just concluded its 2019 summit, a biennial event that welcomes education stakeholders to discuss education innovation in Doha, Qatar.

This year’s conference welcomed over 3,200 experts and stakeholders from over 100 countries. As we look forward to the next WISE summit in 2021, we reflect on the organization’s origins and accomplishments.

The vision behind WISE, according to CEO Stavros Yiannouka, is “to mobilize a community of action…to forge partnerships [and] to create a movement around wanting education to become a genuine human right.”

Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and Her Highness Sheika Moza bint Nasser established Qatar Foundation in 1995 to foster a more diversified economy in their small peninsular nation. Qatar’s economy is highly dependent on oil; today, the petroleum product accounts for 70% of government revenues as well as 85% of export earnings. Qatar Foundation, however, is committed to fostering a future in Qatar in which the economy is more skills focused—a knowledge economy. The foundation’s focus is not just limited to Qatar’s school-age population. Rather, the Qatar Foundation is working hard to foster innovation within the entire community.

Early Origins: Qatar Foundation WISE was founded from a larger organization: Qatar Foundation. His J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 48

Qatar Foundation funds several facets of community enrichment in Qatar.

The foundation co-owns Mathaf: Arab

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Stavros Yianouka, CEO of WISE.

Museum of Modern Art, which features a unique collection of modern and contemporary Arabic art. It supports a national debate organization and a diabetes awareness organization. Qatar Foundation also established a green building council devoted to supporting sustainable building practices. Further, it supports arts initiatives in Qatar, including a musical academy and a traveling philharmonic orchestra.

However, outside of focusing on the Qatari community, the Qatar Foundation’s efforts have also taken a global focus. The Foundation has established education efforts across the Arab world, including an institute that promotes family-centric policies across the region and a reality TV program where contestants compete to present scientific solutions to global challenges. The Qatar Foundation has also expanded its impact outside the Arab world. The Qatar Foundation International (QFI) seeks to connect the Arab world with the global community, providing students in Qatar, the Americas, and the UK with the education necessary to make them global citizens. Perhaps most notable, however, is the global program that the Qatar Foundation has named its flagship education forum: WISE. The Components of a Global Movement WISE was founded in 2009 to bring together decision makers, teachers,

Singer/Songwriter Shakira addressing WISE Summit 2019 in Doha, Qatar.

and educational experts to solve global challenges in education. The vision behind WISE, according to CEO Stavros Yiannouka, is “to mobilize a community of action…to forge partnerships [and] to create a movement around wanting education to become a genuine human right.”

Ultimately, it seems that this vision is becoming a reality. When asked about his organization’s biggest highlights over its first decade, Yiannouka remarked that the organization had truly become a global movement. Indeed, the WISE community includes voices from almost 200 countries working together to solve global challenges, such as poverty or conflict, through education. Its biennial WISE summit brings thousands of policy makers, thought leaders, and education experts from all over the world to discuss current educational challenges in Doha.

One highlight of the WISE summit includes the WISE Prize, an award established in 2011 by Sheika Moza bint Nasser to recognize an innovative, world-class contribution to education.

Past WISE prize winners have built universities focused on student leadership and addressed disparities in women’s education. The 2019 winner, Larry Rosenstock, founded a network of charter schools across the United States that challenged existing conceptions of vocational education. Outside of the WISE prize, the organization awards six outstanding projects in education

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each year with the WISE Awards.

WISE has received over 3,200 applications from over 151 countries since the award was established in 2009. In addition to awarding pioneers in global education, WISE sponsors detailed research inquiries that explore some of the most salient challenges in the field. Previous reports have explored the ways in which states educate elite athletes and the ways in which education can promote children’s wellbeing.

One particularly engaging study published this past year by WISE investigates learning ecosystems.

WISE is intimately familiar with learning ecosystems, defined as “open and involving communities of diverse providers” catering to a variety of educational needs. Working beyond traditional schooling, educational ecosystems harness a wide range of community resources, social interactions, and technological tools to provide learners with a holistic educational experience. WISE gained this familiarity through its own learning ecosystem, the crown jewel of the Qatar Foundation’s 25-year-old initiative to build a world class education system in Qatar: Education City.

Education City: Qatar Foundation’s Crown Jewel Education City is aptly named. A learning ecosystem located in Doha,

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Dr. Asmaa Al-Fadala, Director of Research, handing out awards to this year’s WISE summit honorees.

Larry Rosenstock receiving the 2019 WISE Prize by Her Highness Sheika Moza bint Nasser.

Qatar, Education City links research universities with start-up incubators and cultural institutions. It is home to nine universities, including branches of Ivy League schools (Georgetown and Cornell) and the number one university in London (University College of London). It also offers pre-university education, featuring secondary schools that offer IB-accredited programs and an advanced STEM school. Education City hosts several schools that promote innovative solutions to educational challenges. It offers schools for children with autism and children with learning disabilities. It houses a progressive school where students can design their own curriculum.

particularly compelling quote which argued that the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who lack skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but rather “those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

However, in addition to these institutions that offer new ways to meet educational challenges, Education City also hosts several institutions, which harken back to Qatar’s Islamic heritage. Its Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) offers an Islamic studies program, a modern madrasa that revitalizes the idea of the mosque as a place for both worship and study. Education City’s mosque also emphasizes this mission—its tagline is ‘more than just a place of worship,’ and it has hosted a variety of events for the community. Further, as a learning ecosystem, Education City allows all learners to benefit from a wide variety of resources outside of traditional schools and research

the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who lack skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but “those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” institutions. It hosts start-up incubators and technology parks. Education City is also home to the National Library, which provides a wide variety of innovative resources to the community, including workstations, which house 3D printers, recording equipment, and virtual reality accessories.

The National Library also helps Qatar Foundation foster an appreciation for the arts within Education City. Each month, the National Library hosts the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra (QPO), which works to instill a love of music within the community. Other efforts support an appreciation for the visual arts. For example, Qatar Foundation’s Art Trail initiative offers guided tours of the artwork located around Education City.

Unlearning and Relearning: The Future of WISE This year’s WISE summit theme was “Unlearn, Relearn.” In a recent interview, Stavros Yiannouka explained that the idea for the theme came from a J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 50

This year’s summit provided participants with plenty of opportunities to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser announced a new plan to help millions of children learn across the world when she reaffirmed her commitment to universal primary education. Conference goers had the opportunity to relearn conceptions of classroom mental health in a panel discussion where wellbeing was described as a skill that must be taught in schools. And ultimately, all had a chance to unlearn their conception of adequate vocational education when technical education innovator Larry Rosenstock was awarded the 2019 WISE prize.

However, the future of WISE will do much more than establish unlearning and relearning. In the years to come, Yiannouka says that he would like to see WISE become “more of an innovation hub” directly involved in educational developments rather than just leading the conversation around education innovation. With all that the organization has accomplished in the past ten years, it will be exciting to see what this next decade holds for WISE. ●

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EDUCATION T RESEARCH AT WISE PREPARES US FOR THE FUTURE

hose attending this year’s World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, will find the forum highly focused on the future.

The meeting is expected to explore several futuristic themes, including advancements in synthetic biology, plans for smart cities, and new technologies in robotics. Much will have to be done in preparation for the future that will be discussed at Davos— policies will have to change, research will have to be conducted, and cities will have to be adapted. However, most fundamentally, in order to prepare for the future that will be imagined in Davos, education as we know it will have to change to prepare the next generations for the future.

By: Allyson Berri

The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) is imagining what this future of education might look like. WISE is exploring a variety of innovative solutions to current and future challenges in education, by bringing together stakeholders from the fields of business, education, government and non-profit organizations, to discuss education as a solution to global challenges like poverty and inequality. In the latest series of reports, WISE research partners have explored the ways J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 52

education might best innovate to change with the future.

Reimagining Leadership Both In and Out of the Classroom Imagining educational leadership as more than just the school principal is an approach that school systems need in the classrooms of today and tomorrow. Researchers from WISE

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and Northwestern University argue that a multi-level, distributed perspective of leadership is needed to best understand which actors are capable of influencing learners in schools, which in today’s world no longer exist as standalone entities.

This distributed perspective moves the definition of leadership away from administration and considers the leadership potential of a wider range of actors, including parents, teachers, and policy makers.

In a 21st century world, a distributed perspective of leadership is necessary to accommodate the full spectrum of learning. For example, learners worldwide are being exposed to a host of different cultural practices outside the classroom, such as storytelling, dice, dominoes, bartering, dancing, or rapping at home, and these various cultural inputs contribute to their understanding, and therefore learning, inside the classroom.

Oftentimes, cultural practices are not seen as educational resources; worse, some teachers may shun students for bringing their cultural practices into the classroom. A distributed view of educational leadership, however, prompts teachers to look outside of the classroom and consider how cultural practices might contribute to student learning. A student who might struggle with counting in the classroom, for instance, may pick-up

A distributed view of educational leadership prompts teachers to look outside of the classroom and consider how cultural practices might contribute to student learning. basic arithmetic skills through a traditional dice game. Teachers who have this cultural awareness could help students find new ways to learn.

The Effect of Global Citizenship Education Global citizenship education works to use an understanding of international interconnectedness to tackle large global issues such as migration and climate change.

The UN notes that global citizenship education is crucial to providing students with the tools and understanding they will need to resolve the interconnected global challenges of the future. Recent WISE research conducted by scholars from Durham University looked at the real-life impact of global citizenship education. Using data from the 2016 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), a survey that measures the ways in which young people are prepared to take on their roles as citizens, WISE researchers at Durham University

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were able to measure the impact global citizenship education has on schools across 23 different countries.

Though more research is needed, results indicate that students respond positively to global citizenship education.

In the report, researchers identify a need for teachers trained in global citizenship education. The results show that not having a specialized teacher trained in global citizenship education tends to have a negative effect on student attitudes towards tolerance and diversity. Ultimately, teacher training in global citizenship education will be crucial in preparing students for the world’s future challenges, which will be even more global in scale.

Changing Our Understanding of Institutional Excellence The research needed to make the discussions that will take place at Davos in January a reality will happen in universities across the world.

However, the number of universities operating and conducting research globally is much larger than institutional rankings would lead us to believe. As a recent WISE report notes, the elite ranking scheme that presents the world’s top research institutions only applies to about 15% of the world’s 17,000 universities.

The report authors from WISE

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and the University of Pennsylvania argue that a broader understanding of institutional excellence is needed to recognize the achievements of a wider majority of institutions that conduct valuable local research and effectively pursue excellence and serve their communities. Using the Georgetown University branch campus in Qatar and Qatar University as case studies researchers explored the ways institutions are achieving excellence outside of global rankings.

At Qatar University, for example, the institution values faculty interacting with real-world problems in the community—and the community response has been effective. The institution’s college of engineering, for example, has received more than 5.4 million dollars from industry over the last ten years and recently hosted over a hundred industry representatives to discuss potential joint ventures to increase engineering’s societal and economic impact. In a world that is becoming more research-driven and data-based, it is important to recognize the capacity that smaller universities like Qatar University have for stimulating economic and societal development.

A New Emphasis on Wellbeing in the Classroom Though understanding mental health might not rely on the same cuttingedge technology that’s bringing about the latest advancements in synthetic biology or artificial intelligence, improving wellbeing in our schools and workplaces is a crucial component of preparing for a healthier future. Recent WISE research conducted by a team of researchers from the RAND Corporation indicates that while several schools have implemented curriculums targeted to produce both educational and health outcomes, case studies reveal varying degrees of success. Researchers found that programs focused on creating individual outcomes, rather than systematic change, tended to be more successful. For example, programs which focus on changing implicit theories have been shown to be successful in changing student mental health outcomes in the classroom.

Implicit theories focus on two ways of looking at intelligence: fixed mindsets and growth mindsets. Students who view their intelligence through a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence is innate and cannot be changed; in J A N U A RY 2 0 2 0 54

contrast, students who view their intelligence through a growth mindset believe that their intelligence is malleable and that academic failure provides an opportunity to learn and grow. When the same framework is applied to health outcomes, such as curricula on bullying, depression, and anxiety, outcomes have been shown to be strong in a wide variety of cultural contexts.

As we prepare to discuss the latest solutions to a myriad of global challenges in Davos this January, it’s important to remember the educational challenges we must first address to pave the way towards the future. From a better understanding of global citizenship education to new research on wellbeing in the classroom, improving education across the world is the first step towards imagining the high-tech future we will begin discussing in Davos this year. ●

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Allyson Berri is Diplomatic Courier’s Senior Correspondent. This reporting is a result of her coverage of the 2019 WISE Summit in Doha.

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