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Premium beyond DigitalHow blurring boundaries in lifestyle, leisure and media will change the way to win with luxury propositions, high end retail, premium products and services.

Premium beyond DigitalHow blurring boundaries in lifestyle, leisure and media will change the way to win with luxury propositions, high end retail, premium products and services.

2017.

PhotograPhyAll photos byKeiko Goto, Eindhoven, The Netherlandshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/keiko-goto-812a2067/

except on pages 6

ILLUStratIoNSSona Paytyan

CoNtaCtFiliberto Amati, [email protected]

Marco Bevolo, [email protected]

DISCLAIMER: By using this report, you accept this disclaimer in full.

The white paper contains information about branding and innovation in premium and luxury goods and service. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we exclude all representations, warranties, under-takings and guarantees relating to the report.

Without prejudice to the generality of the forego-ing paragraph, we do not represent, warrant, undertake or guarantee: that the information in the report is correct, accurate, complete or non-misleading; that the use of guidance in the report will lead to any particular outcome or result.

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In this disclaimer, “we” means (and “us” and “our” refer to) Filiberto Amati, domiciliated in Kruczkowskiego 6A / 19, 00412 Warsaw Poland; and Marco Bevolo, domiciliated in Jan van Eyck-gracht, 116 5645LG Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Marco BevoloHe is Partner at Amati & Associates and the founder of Marco Bevolo Consulting, working for selected customers in Europe and Asia, includ-ing FCA, Mondadori Educational and CitiesNext GmbH (Vienna). In his consulting capacity, he has worked with the Municipality of Eindhoven, LightProjects (Leni Schwendinger), Lighting Design Collective (Tapio Rosenius and partners) and Think in a Tank (the LDC Helsinki Design Week event). In this extracurricular capacity, in the lustrum 2010-2015 he has been the Principal Research Urban Futures for Philips Lighting in Europe, Poland, Czech Republic.

From 1999 to 2009 he was a Director at Philips Design headquarters in the Netherlands, where he was the driving force behind CultureScan, the cultural futures research program. Bevolo started his professional career at ItalDesign Giugiaro in 1990. He was Editor in Chief for Intervista, an Italian lifestyle editorial spin-off of Flash Art International. Bevolo worked as copywriter with Armando Testa for clients like P&G and Bolton, joining Euro RSCG in 1998. He is currently Lecturer in International Leisure Man-agement at NHTV University of Applied Sciences, where he designed and delivered courses in “Placemaking and Destination Shaping”, a vocational course in “Urban Brand Experience”, and curated the supervision of proj-ects commissioned by Philips Consumer Lifestyle, BrainJuicer NYC, Dutch Design Week, plus the municipalities of Maastricht, Eindhoven, Breda, Tilburg and Rotterdam. He has lectured and contributed to seminars and events with ARUP, University of Delaware, London School of Economics, UNAM Postgraduate School of Architecture of Mexico City, at the Temasek Polytechnic of Singapore, at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has been regularly invited to contribute at leading events by ESOMAR, DMI and the Global Urban Summit, (Rotterdam, 2010).

He earned his Ph.D. on the role of design in generating urban futures at The Graduate School, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Tilburg University, with Prof. Mommaas (Head of CPB, The Hague), Prof. Rijsman and Dr. Bishop among his supervisors and assessors. He lives between Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and Turin, Italy, with Japanese wife, Keiko Goto Bevolo.

About the authors

5www.amati-associates.com

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Filiberto AmatiHe is a branding and innovation consultant with nearly two decades of experience in bringing major brands to market, launching or repositioning products, managing commercial restructuring and coaching entrepreneurs, across two sides of the Atlantic. Filiberto has always followed his pas-sions, making them his work: first and foremost in luxury and premium brands, which he advised at Plush Design Barcelona (working with Moët et Chandon, Vanity Fair, Prada Fragrances and Cosmetics, Carolina Her-rera Fragrances) and in Amsterdam as a consultant for Auberon Growth (Heineken, Philips Domestic Appliances and Electronics); then electronics, where, as Interim Sr. Director of End User Innovation at Philips, he failed to stop the mega launch of 3D TV, but successfully drove the development of Photoframe, Skype related products, Aurea and the Ambient Living Strategy. Those now form the core of Philips’ IoT strategy.

Subsequently, Filiberto’s natural passion for beer and cocktails brought him to Gruppo Campari (in Monte Carlo, St Maarten, Mexico and Belgium) and Disaronno (Belgium and The Netherlands,) and finally to advising companies like Diageo, Damm and Efes. Filiberto lectures in branding and innovation at the Polish Academy of Sciences and is regularly hired as an in-company speaker (e.g. SABMiller, Esadecreapolis.) He is the author of Co-creation: Mystery Solved! (2014) and the academic paper Consumption Rituals: a strategic marketing framework (2015).

He holds a Master’s degree in Commercial Engineering from the Univer-sity of Naples Federico II (1998), together with a MBA from IESE Business School in Barcelona (2003) and a DBA from the Institute of Economics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (2015). Filiberto serves as Chairman of the Innovation Advisory panel of Inclusive Growth Forum in Geneva.

6 Premium beyond Digital

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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LIFESTYLES IN THE CITY BETWEEN WORK AND URBAN LEISURE WILL BLUR AS TWO POLARITIES ON A CONTINUUM; WHERE BEHAVIOURS, ACTIVITIES AND CATEGORIES OVERLAP AND COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER. IN THIS NEW WORLD OF “COLLAGE CONSUMPTION” PRODUCT CATEGORIES THEMSELVES WILL CEASE TO ExIST. AS SUCH, BLURRING INTO NEW HYBRID PROPOSITIONS BEYOND LINEAR INNOVATION. ACCORDINGLY, ENTERPRISES WILL NEED TO RETHINK THEIR STRATEGY, TO RETAIN THEIR LEADERSHIP ROLE, BY LEVERAGING THE DIGITAL IMPACT AND NOT BY SUFFERING ITS CONSEqUENCES PASSIVELY.

In a nutshell, firms, enterprises and corpo-rations that play or service players in the luxury / premium categories and sectors will need to evolve their strategic process to address the future by design. At both the socio-cultural level (e.g., future trends and foresight) and the customer and consumer insight level; beyond the current product-centric boundaries.

The purpose of this paper is to anticipate and describe, in its business impact, the phenomenon of the “Blur”. The “Blur” consists of the merging of lifestyles and activities across work and leisure enabled by digital media and tools. In the past 15 years, we have already witnessed the blurring of product boundaries., Where traditional category roles have been superseded by the smartification of devices; As a matter of fact smart phones and tablets have superseded DVD and Blue Ray players and even challenging TV sets as content platforms and traditional content distributors (e.g., Amazon, Netflix, Hulu) in-creasingly relying on their own content and digital streaming. We now posit that this

blurrification process will continue beyond products and services, to include lifestyle, occasions and needs e.g. with the traditional border between “work” and “play” disap-pearing. With this exploration, we aim to sketch the new landscape of consumption and propose hypotheses of the evolution of luxury and premium that might enable sustainable business growth for the next five years and beyond. To do so, we have identified urban futures and the impact of technologies on future cities as a key factor in the determination of future hypothesis of lifestyle and, therefore, consumption.

Position and PurposeThe digital transformation will open the door to a wide-impact transformation of lifestyles and consumption.

Sources and Expert PanelWe would like to thank the following thought leaders and experts who granted their time and input to a first cycle of structured inter-views. Functioning in the validation, elabora-tion and sharpening our initial hypotheses originally derived from desk research:

1. Roland Heiler, Chief Design Officer, Porsche Design, Germany

2. Greg Furman, Chairman, Luxury Mar-keting Council, New York, New York, United States of America

3. Gary Chang, Founder, EDGE Design Institute Ltd., Hong Kong

4. M.A. Zaman, President and CEO, Royal Falcon Fleet, Stockholm, Sweden

5. Blanca Lopez Garcia, Founding Partner, Les Belles Maisons, Madrid, Spain

6. Christophe Ramel, Asia Pacific Mar-keting and Communication Director, Vacheron Constantin, Hong Kong

7. Sergio Cravero, Chief Marketing Officer Lavazza, Turin, Italy

8. Francesco Pagano, Vice President, Head of Portfolio EMEA, Fossil Group Europe, Basel, Switzerland

9. Marcin J. Jasiak, Managing Director STREAM Region, member of the Ex-ecutive Committee, L’Occitane Inter-national, Geneva, Switzerland

10. Borja Castresana, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Desigual, Barcelona, Spain

11. Ivaylo Ankov, Commercial Excellence Director, Molson Coors, Sofia, Bulgaria

12. David Banks, Vice President of Mar-ket Research and Consumer Insights, Kerry Group, Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America

13. Rob Wagemans, Creative Director, CitizenM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

14. Ruben Abbattista, Chairman, Circolo del Design, Turin, Italy

15. Roberto Battaglia, Director, HR, Corporate Investment Banking; Fr. co-founder, Experience Design Lab, Intesa San Paolo, Milan, Italy

16. Paolo Pininfarina, Chairman of the Board, Pininfarina Extra; Chairman, Exclusive Brands Torino, Turin, Italy

17. Marcin Kuchta, Regional Market-ing Director CEE, Nivea Beiersdorf, Vienna, Austria

18. Livia Peraldo, Director, ELLE Décor, Milan, Italy

19. Frank Tjepkema, Designer, Founder Tjep., Amsterdam, The Netherlands

20. Piet Hein Eek, Designer, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

21. Mike Jackson, Joint Founder, Shap-ingTomorrow, London, United King-dom

22. Roberto Bava, CEO Giulio Cocchi Spumanti, Asti; Chairman, Istituto del Vermouth di Torino, Turin, Italy

Urban scenarios are derivative from: BEVOLO, M. ROSENIUS, T. (2014), Create the Livable City, London, AJ Books / EMAP – A book reporting on the city.people.light program 2011 – 2014 by Philips Lighting. Special thanks to: Rinco van Rijn, Global MarCom Manager, Philips Lighting. A key outcome of the paper, above and beyond confirming existing processes of rapid change and visualizing principles to understand future change, is in these lively dialogues themselves. We greatly enjoyed speaking in person with these experts, we actually see this as the most relevant moment of our research. Here lies our key motivation to continue with this editorial project towards valorization and dissemination of findings firstly and to then expand, enrich and refine the research itself for the higher editorial purpose of a pivotal business book. It is in the heart of conversations that we see the core value of research. To all participants, for generously granting their time, the authors wish to express their gratitude.

The main findings, concepts, and conclusions reported in this white paper were presented, tested and discussed with corporate, aca-demic and public audiences in Europe and Japan during a pre-emptive series of talks by the authors


POSITION AND PURPOSE

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Research ApproachThe present paper is elaborated with a hy-brid research approach, namely through a combination of desk research, secondary elaboration of existing data sets and newly performed primary research. We started with the review and discussion of a number of emerging trends as observed in consulting practice and academic commitments and ear-lier publications by the two authors on topics of urban futures and consumption dynam-ics. From this foundation, a first hypothesis was defined with the identification of the metatrend, “Blur”, as the point of arrival of such a preliminary phase of the process. The research process was enabled by three tools: 1) an existing urban futures matrix (source: city.people.light); 2) a technology impact tool, to assess the relationship between urban scenarios and digital innovation; and 3) a consumption impact tool, to connect urban scenarios, digital innovation modalities and the future of consumable, durables and ser-vices. Early findings were discussed and fine -tuned in expert interviews. The interviews were based on a structured questionnaire.

However, they were conducted with a flexible style and a dynamic interaction. The multi-disciplinary mix involved the social sciences, with a particular focus on the qualitative analysis of futures. Design futures method-ologies and existing urban scenarios were elaborated upon through an established strategic design process. Strategic consulting approaches deemed to determine the “So What” for premium consumption in the future, in terms of the impact of digital technolo-gies, emerging lifestyles and city dynamics.

16 URBANFUTURE

SCENARIOS

VALIDATE

QUESTIONS..................

THOUGHTLEADERS

TRENDS TRENDS

2-5yrs 2-5yrs

EXPERTS

CONCLUSIONS

SOCIO CULTURAL DRIVERS

SOCIOLOGY DRIVERS, ,TRENDS

HIGH TECH IMPACT10-15yrs

5-10yrs

5-10yrsCI

TY

STRATE

GIE

S

URBANCONSUMPTION

IMPACT

3 HIGH TECH IMPACT CLUSTERSCATEGORYIMPACT

CON

SUM

ABLE

S

DURABLE

S

SERVIC

ES

METATREND: THE BLUR

DESIGN

=

=

=

=

SCENARIO [5-10yrs]

[10-15yrs]

[2-5yrs]

STRATEGY

STRATEGIES + STRUCTURES IMPACT

IMPACT

» Research Approach


POSITION AND PURPOSE

Contents

About the authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Position and Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Contents. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

A metatrend for future lifestyles: “Blur” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

From trends in luxury to urban challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

The “Blur” and luxury / premium consumption. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Bibliographic References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Annexes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Executive SummaryAn investigation into the blurring of digital and social media, work and leisure, products and categories, and their impact on the urban universes of luxury/ premium.

GAINING AN ACTIONABLE INSIGHT INTO

THE FUTURE, AS IT RELATES TO BOTH

BUSINESS GROWTH AS WELL AS OUR

SOCIETIES, IS AN IMPORTANT CHALLENGE

FOR ALL OF US. FROM POLITICAL PLAYERS

AND ECONOMIC ACTORS TO EVERYDAY

CITIZENS AND POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS,

IT STANDS TO REASON THIS LIST ALSO

INCLUDES CORPORATE MANAGERS,

MARKETING MAVERICKS AND GROWTH

LEADERS OF ALL INDUSTRIES TOO.

The starting meta-trend at the basis of this

paper is that lifestyles in the city will continue

to “Blur” between work and urban leisure as

two polarities on a continuum.

Where, behaviours, activities and categories

overlap and complement each other. In this

new world of “collage consumption” business

categories themselves will cease to exist as

such. They will increasingly blur into new

blended propositions, beyond linear innova-

tion. Accordingly, enterprises will need to re-

think their strategy in order to gain, regain

or retain their leadership role, by leveraging

social innovation and digital impact and not

by suffering its consequences passively. The

coming of age and rise to the executive power

of Millennials, with their nomadic lifestyles

and project-orientation, as the first genera-

tion of true digital natives will only speed

up and amplify the effects of this paradigm

change. In a nutshell, enteprises will need

to transform their DNA and their strategic

processes to address the future by design.

This is both at a socio-cultural level (e.g., fu-

ture trends and foresight) and at the people,

customer and consumer insight level; beyond

the current product-centric boundaries. For

ease of reading, an overview and synthesis of

the assets and different approaches within

this paper are presented as follows:

1. Urban scenarios are crafted by cross-

referencing socio-cultural drivers and

city strategies;

2. Urban future scenarios are the nar-

rative context where urban lifestyles

are determined;

3. Urban lifestyles define new value

equations; which determine novel

perceptions of what premium and

luxury are and how they are mani-

fested;

4. Perceptions of luxury translate into

people’s willingness to pay a pre-

mium, from mass luxury to high end.


ExECUTIVE SUMMARY

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Ultimately restructuring consumption

dynamics for commodities, consum-

ables and services at brand, innova-

tion and proposition levels.

As description of the “Blur”, one might say

that the integration of technology and in-

creased connectedness into all aspects of

life has led to the hyper-availability of con-

tent regardless of setting, breaking down

the traditional wall of separation between

work and home. Today’s professional has

access to work emails from the amusement

park and social media at their work desk.

This phenomenon will continue to progress

in our 5 to 10-year time frame. This will be

further triggered with the coming of age of

Millennials and the disruptive introduction

of their project-based, nomadic lifestyles

of digital natives into the work, leisure and

urban spheres. Based on the above, we posit

that this transformation process, which until

now has already been blurring the bound-

aries of categories and cultures, is going to

redefine our understanding of consumption

and lifestyles. As a consequence, the lines

of division between leisure and work, be-

tween home and office, among lifestyles and

categories will seamlessly, pervasively and

inevitably “Blur”. The paper offers extensive

analysis of these themes. Presenting an exist-

ing tool from a world class research program

on urban futures plus two proprietary tools

developed for the specific purpose of this

paper, we will explore this universe. As ac-

tionable outcome, the paper provides key

findings in terms of the impact of the “Blur”

on a number of consumable, durable and

service categories with recommendations.

We chose to conclude with direct extracts

from the dialogs performed with 23 industry

experts and opinion formers.


ExECUTIVE SUMMARY

THESE DOMAINS, TRADITIONALLY, THRIVE IN THE SOPHISTICATED, TREND-SETTING CONTExT OF URBAN ENVIRONMENTS. WHERE, HISTORICALLY, BOTH ELITES AND SUBCULTURES DETERMINED THE CREATION AND THE ADOPTION OF PRODUCTS, PROPOSITIONS AND PRACTICES OF LEISURE AS TASTE MARKERS TO ACHIEVE DISTINCTION AND RADIATE STATUS THROUGH LIFESTYLE. SOCIETIES CONTExTUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY DETERMINE THE MEANING AND THE CONTENT OF WHAT PEOPLE PERCEIVE AS LUxURY AND PREMIUM BE IT CITIZENS OR DESTINATION TRAVELERS. WITHIN ADVANCED ECONOMIES, LUxURY AND PREMIUM PROPOSITIONS WILL CONTINUE TO BE DEVELOPED AND INNOVATED BY URBAN LIFESTYLES, WHERE DIVERSITY AND CREATIVITY RULE.

In particular, this paper proposes to move beyond loose practices of re-framing and sensing, as recently adopted in hybrid approaches between Design Thinking and business consulting. Here, we propose to flexibly develop a qualitative, yet rigorous, structure to manage the foresight background to innovation and branding by means of scenario planning, co-creative tools and a repeatable procedure. On this foundation, we aim at anticipating the impact of technology on consumption, value genera-tion and related dynamics and at analysing its threats and opportunities.

As it is the case with all multidisciplinary research and reflection, we see a higher degree of interest and value in the combination of diverse sources and hybrid methods than in the deterministic use, or abuse, of sterile formulas. Formats and tools might, therefore, emerge from sociol-ogy, foresight, consulting, Design Thinking or other knowledge domains. Nevertheless, they are always provided with the purpose to contribute to the wider scope of analysis under the microscope, or better, through the lens of the spectacles.

Our starting point will be cities and most importantly their future. This will allow us to elaborate on hypotheses about potential impact consump-tion and hence on potential marketing, innovation, retail, distribution and other business processes; from strategy through to route to market. The study of cities through the lens of the future is difficult due to their elusive, non-repeatable nature. A city is not a deterministic and contained experimental context, as is a science lab, it is a living organism with al-most infinite variables. Where, the future is actually co-determined by citizens, visitors, stakeholders and more. When you add such a challenge to the uncertainty that comes with a city’s complex web of unforeseen ‘wild cards’, from weather management to earthquakes, it is self-evident how ineffective it would be to adopt a deterministic approach. This is

IntroductionThis paper was inspired by the ambition to scope and connect hypotheses on the possible future of business, commerce and consumption, as alluded to previously, from the viewpoint of urban dynamics and technology impact, with particular focus on the luxury and premium categories.

“Companies devised the concept of category, and as it happens all time, consumers are challenging them. the view of people is almost never the view of the academia or the industry. If companies do not transform, someone is going to become the ambassador of consumers (e.g. alexa with amazon) and then companies are going to have a hard time surviving.”


INTRODUCTION

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even further amplified by new dynamics of digital convergence and hyper connectivity.

The urban futures framework1 we propose, as consolidated since 1995 from earlier re-search programs, namely city.people.light, is a matrix that leaves us with 16 distinct scenarios; sketching and describing urban directions of evolution possibly impacting the next lifestyles and behaviors. The 16 scenarios should be interpreted as base vectors of a multi-dimensional space and rather complement one another. They are depicted as independent scenarios, however they are not mutually exclusive or method-ologically alternative to each other, as each represents a possible urban narrative that might be combined with others in the future of a city. From this overview of urban futures scenarios, the basis was determined to proj-ect possibilities and identify preferences in terms of impact on consumption through a technology-related mapping.

Firstly, a preliminary reflection on trends and developments, existing at the moment in the fields of reference, will trigger our re-flection and inspire our elaborations. These selected trends find their tipping point in the “meta-trend” of “Blur”, that pervasively applies to lifestyles, to activities (e.g., work or leisure) or domains (e.g., home or office), to modalities of consumption, to brand mar-keting and to product categories. All these concepts will be transformed in spaces of continuum, where opposites often meet, by the blurring of boundaries, with “work” being performed remotely at home or on vacation; with “leisure” activities like yoga or fitness being performed at the office; with luxury focusing on leisure lifestyles instead of

1 The classic scientific notion of forecast through demographic projections and statistics might therefore not be sufficient to operate in the con-temporary and near future urban context. This is why this paper leveraged an existing bibliograph-ic asset, generated as outcome from a research program conducted since 1995 by a world class manufacturer of outdoor lighting solutions. The program was directed for its socio-cultural futures research part. Scenarios are therefore based on an asset that was developed through a collaboration of experts over more than 20 interviews and 10 international workshops. On such solid empiri-cal practice, a proprietary framework published in the same bibliographic source combines both the strategic planning/design of urban areas and the longer term socio-cultural drivers of society.

consumption. This is a change dynamic that has rapidly and drastically evolved and its fastest and hardest potential impact in the future will be at the top of premium margins and luxury propositions.


INTRODUCTION

MARKETING COMMUNICATION AND ADVERTISING CONSTITUTE THE FIELD WHERE CONVERGING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES MOST DRASTICALLY DISRUPTED THE STATUS qUO. THIS HAPPENED ALREADY TO THE POINT THAT ONE MIGHT STATE THAT MILLENNIALS HAVE A RADICALLY DIFFERENT RELATIONSHIP WITH BOTH MEDIA CHANNEL CONTExT AND CHANNELED CONTENT THAN GENERATION x.

Since the 1950’s, the traditional advertising model was based on the concept of prime-time; a block of broadcasting television pro-grams who exerted a TV set gravitational pull. Of course, prime-time was not the only block and therefore not the only opportunity for advertising. TV was not even the only media and TV sets started proliferating beyond the living room and, consequently, TV lost its role as a “family come together” at the end of the 1990’s. Nonetheless, from the point of view of advertisers, broadcasters, content producers and viewers/ consumers there were time frames, blocks, windows and occasions which defined the pace and the rhythm of our day. Audiences knew when they would get the news, when they would get entertained and so on. Even the rise of thematic channels or the proliferation of TV-sets updated and complemented but did not disrupt that model. And those occasions went beyond the media and entertainment consumption. They clearly defined the time to oneself vs. the time for family; the time to work and the time to play. The event went to develop consumption rituals that helped switching from one occasion, from one win-dow to another. Just as the drinks after work or the long urban and sub-urban commutes with the radio or a book. In short, one might describe the TV set as the “factory clock” of the postwar society and such a social clock,

synchronizing all of us nationally since the late 2000’s, is simply no longer.

As digitalization has developed into a large-scale phenomenon the boundaries between the product and service categories have started to blur. Personal computers and lap-tops, initially a productivity device belonging to the “work” sphere, have become gaming and entertainment devices. Smartphone, tablets and laptops are not the only screens in the living room when the TV is on; people watch TV while chatting, skyping, tweeting or while active on other social media. People don’t look at just one screen at the time any longer.

What was a consumer electronic related, media-centric phenomenon, later converted to a wider set of consumer categories. Just as a few FMCG examples might be described in our most mundane everyday lives. Since the mid 2000’s, wet shaving (blade) and dry shaving (electric) converged into a contin-uum. Flavored beers and ciders are growing faster and faster in the refreshment and meals occasions, traditionally owned by soft drinks and historically male categories are becoming more and more conscious and oriented towards female audiences (such as whisky, cigars and gin). This pertains to Western markets and advanced economies. However, no need to add, the very notion of “West” has greatly changed, with the former Eastern European block converging with the European Union, the rise of China as an ex-periment of super capitalist Communism and the problems raised by the integration of post-modern lifestyles within traditional cultures and vice versa.

A metatrend for future lifestyles: “The Blur”One might say that the “Blur” goes well beyond such convergence of digital platforms. However, it is with this digital media new paradigm, enabled by the rise of smart phones and the end of mass communication, that the “Blur” could be seeded in advanced economies.


A METATREND FOR FUTURE LIFESTYLES: “THE BLUR”

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Manifestations of the “Blur”

The “Blur” is manifested in the convergence across product category boundaries which has been observed in the past 10-15 years. Of course, in different regional contexts, differ-ent outcomes have resulted from this process. However, universally it might be stated that the emergence of digital solutions enabled and multiplied phenomena underpinning this macro-tendency. At the consumer experience and consumption level, this meta-trend can be best characterized as the emergence of ecosystems beyond product. Breaking with the traditional paradigm of category based consumption. A TV-centric living room of early 2000, which delivered news and entertain-ment, has been superseded by a number of larger and smaller displays and devices which are connected to content distributors via IP.

The most solid point of evidence might be in the changing blueprint of our work-life balance and the blurring boundary between “work” and “play”. Most companies no longer impose a dress code. Even the ones, who in the late 90s asked their lab employees, who for safety reasons and convenience were exempted from formal dress, to wear a pre-scribed attire for lunches at the corporate cafeteria. Nowadays, when there is a code, it is actually part of a mutual understanding be-tween employees and employers. It is not, to any further extent, forcibly enforced through HR policies. Increasingly “internal start up’s” and the adoption of modalities experimented in accelerators and incubators are part of the

HR mix of multinational corporations in an effort to retain and motivate new generations of their workforce. Moreover, the shape and form of the office is changing beyond cubicles and meeting rooms. It is becoming more and more common to have informal work areas, adult-size playgrounds with slides, football and video games, hammocks and putting greens instead of meeting room chairs and tables. Clearly giving away that the bound-ary between work and play is disappearing. On the other hand, the computing power, which we carry on ourselves in the forms of tablets, phones and laptops, combined with increasing wireless broadband connectivity are enabling work in parks, bars and cafes or commuting routes. We can conduct work from almost anywhere and at any time. In a nutshell, the boundaries that separated the professional and personal time are becoming indistinct while the consumption rituals that marked the passage from one to another are also disappearing.

The “Blur” has been the context in which the Millennials have grown up and have already started generating new businesses, practices and rituals. Such cultural ground, rich with professional talent and enriched by a new vision of leisure, from serious (e.g., volunteer-ing) to abnormal (e.g., semi-legal behaviors that might go unchartered), will determine a new paradigm, setting a stage where so-cial norms and values will mature into new standards. Such standards will determine new notions of value, status and prestige. For example, in the mid-term, owning a car may



itself become a negative status marker, as cutting edge individuals will move in autono-mous vehicles with new shared ownership business models firmly in the rearview mirror.

Brands and the “Blur”

The emergence of the “Blur” within lifestyles principally put an end to the notion of “con-sumer need” and “consumption occasion”. The very notion of “consumer” is already worn out for a couple of decades. This is increas-ingly replaced, in research and business, by the awareness that people are people beyond consumption and in holistic terms. The need/occasion pillar has become too vague as a concept to be actionable, both from a con-sumer and a producer standpoint. There are no clear and actionable ways of identifying the traditional border between working life and leisure, or holiday and business travel, or personal and professional sphere. Suffice to say that, today, gamification is already pervasively used as a marketing and innova-tion tool or as a productivity platform in the world of business. In the personal sphere, gamification is also used to promote better lifestyles and improve one’s education. The caveat is, of course, that neither the need nor the occasions cease to exist. Although they become almost intangible, we can’t describe them any longer through deter-ministic equations.

With the need/occasion model shattering in to pieces, brands can only trust the gravi-tational pull derived from their reputation. Brands need to become beacons and beacons will be such because of three critical aspects: relevance, purpose and sensory network:

Relevance will cease to become a concept of fit to a consumption context, to become a filter for people’s ambition. Beyond needs and occasion, people’s ambition will be mea-sured on how well an experience fits with their values, drive and goals. Should that refer to fitting-in or standing-out, improving their health or creating a better world for their children and so on.

On another level, strong purposes will enable communication platforms with efficient and effective targeting and will become a stra-tegic screener of the content management strategy, beyond the current non-sense of brands tactically tapping on all sorts of news and gossips.

Finally, since the 2000’s, brands have devel-oped their own sensory network. That, on one hand, will help identify weak signals at consumer level, and on the other, will induce co-designing of tactical responses with end-users. Since, in a turbulent environment, the only notion of equilibrium that make sense is dynamic, brands need to develop a capabil-ity of perceiving the tiniest changes in the market place to ensure they can move and survive in the dynamic equilibrium.

Within this context, the increasingly sophis-ticated trend research competences that en-terprises developed internally and leveraged in outsourcing mode prove mission-critical in anticipating the future. In particular, the understanding of people and their socio-cul-tural landscapes of values proved a key asset to rethink innovation from the viewpoint of human priorities further than the mechanical execution of technology roadmaps. This will increasingly be mission-critical in reaching new audiences and connecting to their life-styles and ambitions.

“the ‘Blur’ is impacting the way we communicate with our customers. our boutique staff has one-to-one relationship with the customers, and they are connected with clients on Whatsapp, twitter and chat. a lot of customers expect our staff to be connected 24 by 7, because they have no time and they seek faster interactions, they are not going to wait for the day after.”



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WHETHER IT BE FOR URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE, PROGRAMS FOR METROPOLITAN REGIONS OR FOR RETAIL BUSINESS PURPOSES. SEVEN SPECIFIC MACRO-TRENDS AND CHALLENGES WERE CAPTURED, BELOW, IN A RATHER NARRATIVE, ALMOST JOURNALISTIC FASHION AS A WAY TO CONSOLIDATE THE LANDSCAPE AND INTRODUCE THE OPERATIONALIZATION STARTING FROM THE ACTUAL “BLUR” META-TREND THAT THE AUTHORS IDENTIFIED AS THE FOUNDATION FOR THIS PAPER.

Such meta-trend differs from the sketches below in that its flexibility and elasticity makes it applicable, and influential, on multiple spheres of society and culture and from lifestyles to consumption. One might say the seven inspirations below provide a feeling on specific dynamics related to luxury, premium and cities. Whereas, the “Blur” metatrend will be pervasive and seamless in its presence across different, if not all, strata of society, culture and markets.

Trends in Premium and Luxury

Nowhere will the magnitude of the impact derived from the above developments be greater than in the luxury sector and in the premium points of categories old and new. Focusing on trends influencing value perception in these domains one might start with definitions of luxury and the high end, in order to establish a reference point from where to draw new perspectives. Luxury might simply be defined as: “The ability to experience / own the best exclusively attainable” (Bevolo, Gofman, Moskowitz, 2011, 21). Historically, luxury might be manifested in four complementary domains: food, fashion, leisure and shelter. In essence, “distinction” is built by what we eat (and where we eat), by how we dress, by how we experience our free time and by where we live in terms of residence. Likewise, premium might be identified and defined as: “…the aspiration around the offering (be it consumable, durable or service-based), and a strong cultural and emotional connection with people, beyond customers. Across both mature and emerging economies, this generates higher margins at price that lies “within reach”, quantified as 20% higher or more than an equivalent basic offering” (adapted from: Bevolo, Gofman, Moskowitz, 2011, 13).

Starting from these definitions, a number of tendencies were identified, analyzed and valorized in the last decade within consulting practice and by means of educated observation. Describing how both the worlds of luxury and mass luxury might be evolving in the future. As a noticeable example thereof, the three following themes might be considered:

From trends in luxury to urban challengesMacro-trends are the raw forces that every industry actor will have to account for in the strategies they employ when crafting their approach.

“Most purchase decisions are going to be made by algorithms. as consumer goods companies are less aware of that, you need to have external innovation, with accelerators and incubators.”

“traditional brand building in Luxury is in shock. Producers need to let consumers play with their own brand: and no luxury brand is really ready for that.”


FROM TRENDS IN LUxURY TO URBAN CHALLENGES

at the level of lifestyles and values, people will demand time, space and immersive sensorial experiences over material possessions. Luxury used to be focused on material possessions; the refinement and craftsmanship of fine products and sophisticated objects, with leisure experiences being orchestrated around them. But in the future far more attention will be given to immaterial experiences first1, with a stronger focus on sensorial design. And as luxury develops it is shifting towards more abstract domains, yet critical to true quality of life, like time, space and balance to offer a more holistic approach to value perception. In advanced economies, inconspicuous consumption is becoming a key way of signaling elitism. By disdaining from explicit consumerism, while focusing on education, health and retirement; these three categories are the fastest growing in household spending for the top 1% income earners households2.

at the level of brands, storytelling, underpinned by authenticity, will increasingly define success for luxury and premium propositions. Sto-rytelling has emerged as one of the most important tools for luxury brands3. Beyond the foundational tale, storytelling communicates brand values and generates perceived value. Key to this process, in the luxury universe, is authenticity in terms of crafting the overall experience of the product from construction to aesthetics. In addition to a seamless fit between the brand and user’s own storyline.

at the level of innovation, luxury / premium propositions will need to redefine their raison d’etre. As luxury is built on the aspiration of people within cultural norms, and the financial crisis destabilized a number of those established norms, it has also invalidated all category analysis for premium. While in emerging countries luxury brands are still a beacon of status in the advanced economies, post 2007 financial crisis, the erosion

1 http://eventbrite-s3.s3.amazonaws.com/marketing/Millennials_Research/Gen_PR_Final.pdf

2 “The new Subtle ways the rich signal their wealth”, BBC (2017), http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170614-the-new-subtle-ways-the-rich-signal-their-wealth

3 For example the role of storytelling in luxury watch sales as presented in Forbes (2014). Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/arieladams/2014/06/19/how-emotion-storytelling-makes-a-difference-in-luxury-watch-sales/#42bad71a3ba6

“Luxury will increasingly be about time management, freedom of choice and a number of other immaterial qualities of life; luxury will be about security, not about flying cars or other impossible concepts. hacking, compatibility and other practical problems will determine new categories of luxury..”



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of trust in the financial, banking and political systems has also worn out the notion of luxury as a fairly earned reward. Thus, pushing the luxury brands boundaries towards the uncomfortable regions of excess and greed. The industry will have to coalesce upon a new innovation para-digm and perhaps even a new vision and mission altogether. Redefining its role within communities at the center and evolve its rich history in patronage, heritage, and cultural/identity in new forms of socio-cultural connection. A new paradigm built on a clear sense of direction and pur-pose, with a renewed sense of sustainability, awaits to be formalized by key players in this sector.

Urban Challenges

Shifting on to the future of cities, it is possible to intuitively observe and to report as potential, pivotal key points of current and future change starting from four mega-trends determining urban futures:

Cities will appeal people more than ever before (beyond gentrification). Cities will continue to be the destination of tourism, leisure and business travelers. This will be a natural outcome of creating new unexpected op-portunities through digitalization and transforming visitors in to temporary citizens through new concepts of city marketing and urban branding. To manage this shift, multidisciplinary teamwork among specialists with backgrounds ranging from sociology to engineering, will have to put people at the core of their work. At the same time, since Richard Florida launched his “creative class” concept a decade ago, gentrification and the exploitation of city centers determined the first signs of migration from the creative class4 itself and even middle class citizens to the coun-tryside or back to the suburbs. Florida himself, perhaps in an attempt to recycle his own “brand”, recently stated that the Urban Revival in the US might be over. Yet, we believe that the problem was and is with the way Florida conceptualizes cities, not with the nature of urban centers themselves. Citizens are indispensable to keep urban authenticity and

4 As an example, over 40% of Berlin’s workforce is in the creative class. Source: https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/03/why-twitter-chose-berlin/1609/

“We live in a world where your brand building does not go through traditional Marie Claire or Vogue, but through a blogger with a Pinterest or Instagram account and half a million followers. travel retail is becoming a hybrid of digital and brick & mortar, a huge overlap of business and leisure travellers, a mix of commercial and brand experience, a platform for education (because you have a captive audience). While brick & mortar is key to generate trial and educate consumers, the re-purchase is going to happen more and more into on-line stores, via virtual assistants like alexa: think of amazon Prime, once you subscribe, you are going to purchase everything through them.”



avoid developing cities into theme parks5. Solutions might be a new di-mension of city traveling, within a more advanced notion of temporary citizenship versus tourism, and “localhood”, as anticipated by the city of Copenhagen in their most recent strategies.

Creative industries will be vital to the future. The very nature of creative sectors and applied arts is not only to ‘produce’ products, solutions or events, but also, and especially, to connect, convert and channel intel-lectual, emotional and enterprising energies within societies6. European design clusters (e.g., start-up firms or incubators) and semiotic districts (e.g., fashion centers or lifestyle retail) will continue to grow across borders in size and importance and become vehicles of entrepreneurial dynamism that may integrate with corporates. This is a development that might call for a whole new “gold race”, to retain both new graduates as well as seasoned knowledge workers within the urban borders. At the same time, there will be an increasing drive to discover the historical and the particular; namely the ”vernacular”.

‘Culture’ will be critical to citizens, both permanent and temporary. Un-like infrastructure culture cannot be engineered. It embodies the true ‘vernacular’ that makes the hardware of a ‘place’ into an ‘authentic’ city or metropolitan region, with its own local rituals that define precise lifestyles. Therefore, the ability to balance the profile of the city while

5 Between 2004 and 2014, according to Eurostat, the population living in predomi-nantly urban regions of the EU showed an overall increase of 6.0 %. The most rapid expansion in population numbers was recorded for those living in predominantly urban regions with at least one million inhabitants, where there was a 12.3 % increase in the number of inhabitants. Source: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/7596823/KS-01-16-691-EN-N.pdf

6 According to a study of consulting firm Strategy&, Digital Creative industry will be one of the driving forces for employment in Europe. Source: https://www.strat-egyand.pwc.com/reports/the-digital-future-creative-europe

“there is an increase of consumption the world over in the last decades. the key is how to conceptualize, analyze and control the phenomenon. It is important that the governments start to create a new paradigm at national level. the generational dynamics must be taken into account to create new education formats.”



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maintaining the respect of local traditions will be required to maintain authenticity. We will see a further shift from “place brand marketing” to a more mature notion of “competitive identity”, one that is based on holistic appreciation of real urban life, beyond logos or advertising that betray the ambition to truly distinguish their city7.

Beyond cities, cross-border metropolitan areas will grow in relevance. The development of new regional and even cross-border connections among city centers is projected to be a main theme of European urban futures, with regional and metropolitan areas possibly growing in their importance even above nation states8. This will hold true, and perhaps even more so, on an economic and societal basis, even in the face of pos-sible populist drifts or an increased barrier to flows of people and goods. In the future, economic and knowledge-based alliances and exchange among cities within regions or across national lines of divide might play a much more fundamental role than the actual state policies and politics.

The above sketches were introduced with the plain purpose to provide context and depth to the notion of “Blur” as a pervasive, seamless metatrend in the specific universe of research under the microscope. At the same time, given the applied science nature of this paper and its strong consulting practice orientation, it is a specific choice not to further elaborate on sociological insights but to propose a path to operational-izing and extracting potential triggers to covert the above reflections into potential business value.

The Urban Futures Matrix The Urban Futures matrix is an actionable synthesis of the above key concepts that have been captured by the essence of four socio-cultural drivers and of four city strategies that populate its horizontal and vertical axes. The resulting 16 scenario triggers, or ‘cells’ of the Urban Futures matrix were derived and refreshed from a mix of qualitative research and through leader interviews, as initiated in the mid 1990’s to be extended through multiple iterations of the city.people.light program, with the last milestone elaborated in 2011-2013, as distilled from the formal process of textual research and coding analysis.

Socio-cultural Drivers

Socio-cultural drivers are conceptual constructs of human evolution within regional and global contexts. Think of them as ‘black box’ contain-ers where future researchers store, accumulate and cross-reference hard data, qualitative indicators and broad cultural themes. Analysis of each individual driver provides insight into developments. Whilst studying all four pillars combined offers an overview of ‘what’s next’ on the longer

7 One of the conclusions of the study Culture, Cities and Identity in Europe, under the patronage of the European Economic and Social Committee (2011), culture and creative sector will be a pillar of economic development of European cities in the future. Source: http://www.eesc.europa.eu/resources/docs/qe-01-16-463-en-n.pdf

8 One of the conclusions of the METROBORDER study (2011) is that nearly 50% of cross-border workers in EU27/EFTA are located in metropolitan areas, which feature knowledge intensive economies such as banking, or digital companies. These same metropolitan areas are also showing higher growth rates of frontaliers. Source: http://www.espon.eu/main/Menu_Projects/Menu_ESPON2013Projects/Menu_TargetedAnalyses/metroborder.html



term at planetary scope, e.g. a couple of decades from now, above the level of the macro trends, as introduced above, e.g. 5/10 years from now.

Identity: Within this driver, the accent is on ‘individuals’ and the future is envisioned as a developing flow in time, where individual growth is enabled by self-expression. For our purposes, we are concerned with the stress that arises from the lack of social welfare and group support as a consequence of globalized capitalism.

Exploration: For this driver, individual experiences are enabled and am-plified by their beneficial impact on people’s lives. People’s freedom of choice results in increased consumer sophistication. With the expectation that staged narratives, enabled by new technologies, will underpin the next steps of ‘Dream Capitalism’, allowing new opportunities for creative business models and digital technologies, especially as they relate to the older concept of an ‘experience economy.’

Belonging: This driver is about how people collectively share and bond in a group context, both in real life as well as in virtual communities. This driver has developed dynamically in the last half-decade, and can be seen in emerging phenomena like the formation of bottom-up and kindred-spirit communities which have grown from neighborhood civic initiatives to regional lobbies. Or as in the more recent revolutionary movements that have occurred in cities across Europe and elsewhere.

Sustainability: In this driver, major instabilities such as oil crises, climate change, and environmental unbalance are prejudged and the resulting societal tensions are elements which are anticipated and addressed. Over time, the concept of ‘Sustainability’ has collectively evolved from the ‘green economy’ issues frequently placed on the periphery to include more essentials of people’s wellbeing, human quality of life and public ethics in new notions of citizenship, diversity and inclusion.

City Strategies

City strategies embody potential principles to generate solutions within a specific time frame and place. These constructs are both from a spatial viewpoint as well as in terms of creating meaning from symbols and signs. For this reason, City strategies come from the observation of instrumental practice over time. They are clustered by “Time” (managing a city in order to accelerate it into the future or by recuperating its vernacular from the



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past) and “Space” (managing a city by promoting the proliferation of iconic symbols, objects, buildings or by focusing on its infrastructure).

acceleration (time: Future): This City strategy supports a higher speed of life and an increasingly challenging level of individual performance in order to enable growth at economic, professional and personal lev-els. At the same time, the individual wellbeing and peace of mind that hyper-dynamic lifestyles might compromise should either be protected or restored. (Focus: Time; Global Example: Singapore; European Example: Eindhoven).

Memory (time: Past): This City strategy reconnects both citizens and cities to their historical, personal, and symbolic past in order to gener-ate emotional meaning and/or functional solutions for future develop-ment. The focus of this City strategy might lie in the collective memory of communities at the level of neighborhoods or metropolitan regions, but it might also concentrate on the individual memories of citizens, regardless of whether they are newcomers, such as immigrants or more established locals like seniors. (Focus: Time; Global Example: Seoul; European Example: Turin)

Semiotics (Space: Icons): Within this City strategy urban administrators and city architects, with the participation of people, manage urban ob-jects that enable positive change thanks to generating and/or managing new signs and/or narratives with the objective of consistently appealing to both its citizens and its visitors. The major shift from a ‘city of bricks’ to a ‘city of stories’ is the most visible meta-theme of this strategic approach, with the need to rethink, in depth, the relationship across artificial environments and its context. (Focus: Place; Global Example: Tokyo; European Example: Wroclaw)

Connectivity (Space: Infrastructure): This City strategy increases both the operational excellence and the positive profiling of the city by generating and integrating (hardware-software) hybrid systems at local, regional, national, intercontinental and digital levels. The city as a node, in inter-national networks, is first and foremost a transportation, logistic and functional hub. This City strategy is aimed at reflecting on the potential role that entertainment, green thinking and framework grids might play. Enabling the city to connect to everything ‘outside’ its borders. (Focus: Place; Global Example: Los Angeles; European Example: Lille)

Having provided these two different sets of references it is now pos-sible to use them to develop a conceptual framework of scenarios that we will call Urban Futures. The framework can be used to extrapolate how the socio-cultural elements will interact with a given city strategy and get a handle on the design ramifications for people, planning, and urban business.

Using the parameters as defined above, by pairing a Social-cultural driver with a potential City Strategy we are supported by a matrix of 16 combinations that uniquely offer the opportunity to develop Urban Futures scenarios in a 5 to 10-year time frame:

1. Liquid City: it is flexible and adaptive in both its architectural and administrative structures, in order to support individual citizens in their professional ambitions, e.g. start-up micro-enterprise.

2. Brandscape City: it is planned, designed and marketed according to the tools of advertising and imagineering.

“Cities are more and more efficient, and way more efficient than countryside and villages, because of the scale of distribution, they are naturally more effective.”



3. Eclectic City: it is architecturally diversified in order to go beyond look and feel of standard suburbia and gentrified centers.

4. open City: it is co-designed, with the partici-pation of all urban communities involved in context, with the goal to amplify its diversity and equality, e.g. alternative lifestyles.

5. Dialog City: it is about genuine and authentic interaction and exchange among individuals, e.g. natives and immigrants, in mutual learn-ing processes.

6. repurposed City: it is about assimilating past icons, e.g. industrial buildings, by rethinking the history of the city, e.g. from industrial town to creative class hub.

7. regionalized City: it is a polycentric conurbation of more than one municipal entity over a mixed territory of provinces and regions, sometimes beyond national borders.

8. geomantic City: it is built to fit in its physical context: geography / geology, e.g. earthquakes, and the history and future of climate, e.g. wa-terfront.

9. Integrative City: it is developed on the ability to envision, design and build objects that prevent, mitigate or avoid social conflict.

10. augmented City: it is a “digital reality” of vir-tual objects and surprising urban experiences.

11. Storytelling City: it translates urban objects, e.g. buildings or icons, and spaces, e.g. squares, into triggers within narrative structures.

12. De-mineralized City: it envisions a superficial yet seamless horizon of urban nature replac-ing concrete and glass, through the greening of urban surfaces.

13. Playful City: it leverages urban underground nightlife as “cultural R&D lab” and / or alterna-tive lifestyles incubator.

14. Mixed-System City: it embraces opportunities from “smart applications” and new network-ing beyond traditional lobbies, to redefine its management processes as well as its architec-tural programs.

15. themed City: it leverages architectural arche-types that “make the city” in people’s minds through recurring, recognized and memorable signs.

16. agricultural City: it reconnects to the coun-tryside as a self-sustaining, integrated system, designed to holistically process food, energy and water.

More articulated and expanded descriptions of each scenario are included in the Annex of this paper.

The function of urban futures scenarios is to narratively describe possible evolutions of cities. It should be established that these 16 scenarios were not designed to be mutually exclusive. Each scenario represents one of the “base vectors” in a multidimensional space of urban development. A future city might be managed to evolve according to a linear combination of one or two or more narratives combined from these 16 pos-sibilities. Additionally, any future urban entity might be planned with multiple accents on more specific

Group Individual

Focu

s on

Ti

me

Focu

s on

P

lace

Identity Exploration Belonging Sustainability

Acceleration

Memory

Semiotics

Connectivity Playful Hybrid-system Themed Agricultural

Integrative Augmented Storytelling De-mineralized

Dialog Repurposed Regionalized Geomantic

Liquid Brandscape Eclectic Open

» Urban Futures Matrix (Bevolo, Rosenius, 2014)



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scenarios, depending on the specific character or func-tion of each of its neighbourhoods, For example, an economic development centre, that is entirely “liquid”, might border recreational areas, that include urban gardening or ecological facades, to then shift to night-life areas, that are “playful”, “open” and “eclectic”, as required for their “pulse” and appeal to the youth. At the same time, by means of coherence and synthesis, every city will have a predominant set of characters or traits, also described by a few selected scenarios, constituting its primary identity and determining its perceived image towards the world outside and to its citizens, inside.

Cities and the “Blur”

Having determined a potential taxonomy of future scenarios and before introducing the first proprietary tool to map technological impact by clustering such scenarios, the question naturally arises: where will the future start to happen?

As points of sensibility in acupuncture, some regions or cities are more advanced than others, and there-fore might offer a visual snapshot of how the “Blur” will manifest itself in terms of emergence at urban level. Geographically, it might be possible to identify a selection of cities where the “Blur” might emerge sooner than elsewhere in terms of its positive or even negative dynamics. This is not intended as an exhaus-tive short list however it will provide a first overview of references to position the “Blur” in terms of its spread across the globe:

• New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and London (in spite of Brexit) might be seen as leading in this specific “Blur” metatrend;

• Advanced economies and their capital cities, like Stockholm, are vibrant global places, however national leading centers like Eindhoven (High Tech and design) and Milan (commerce, fashion and design) are crucial crossroads that might leapfrog global metropolis;

• Shanghai is perceived as optimal reference for Asia, because of its speed of change;

• Asia Pacific can be seen as an ideal cradle of the “Blur”, with China and India as very vital, however Tokyo and Japan are also perceived as demographically stagnant;

• European Union and the Americas appear on a difficult phase of their history, with political (US), economic (LatAm) and the combination of politic and economic challenges (EU) possibly delaying growth and innovation;

City Marketing might be seen as a negative indicator when resulting into gentrification and Disneyfication dynamics, e.g. Barcelona or more recently Amsterdam, with city marketing strategies resulting in the very death of the urban texture within several areas of their centers;

Beyond City Marketing, local leading centers with strong ties to their heritage and awareness of their past, will be relevant in Europe for the valorization of their history in combination with new technologies and lifestyles, e.g. Turin, Italy (slow food, mobility, design).

Instead of considering the above short list as an ab-solute reference it must be stressed how its best use



is as inspirational exemplification. Urban scenarios offered a systematic overview of the next decade of cities and the clustering of urban scenarios, according to technological impact, provided a specific continuum from advanced smart cities to slow life centers where new notions of value and therefore new perceptions of luxury / premium will be collectively formed by citizens, both resident and temporary, in their interac-tions with digital technologies.

Introducing the technology impact

We described above how the “Blur” is first and foremost a socio-cultural metatrend, lifestyle and consump-tion phenomenon that was originated as a bundle of manifestations triggered by the disruptive develop-ment of digital technologies and media platforms. As the next step in our analysis, having operationalized the notion of urban futures, we stretch urban think-ing further in order to make connections to lifestyles and consumption dynamics. In order to pursue this, we propose a proprietary tool. This was designed to cluster and mutually position scenarios, in terms of two key analytical dimensions, that will deal with

the relationship between each urban scenario, as introduced above, and the speed of digitalization. The rationale is that the adoption of digital solutions by citizens, be it permanent residents or temporary citizens (business visitors, tourists, short term expats) will be the key factor and the main force to enable the conversion of analogue behaviours into digital lifestyle. This will happen more swiftly in the context of certain urban scenarios, than in others, because each scenario responds to a different mix of socio-cultural values and of strategic intent. Hence, offering a different context to behavioural processes.

Firstly, in such technological development, as seen through a spectrum, we consider a continuum among:

• Future city scenarios; where the context will result in a de-digitalized, disconnected every day, e.g. without IoT solutions enabling seam-less data collection (Rewind Digitalization);

• Future city scenarios; where citizens and stake-holders, including decision-makers, will have a neutral attitude, or an agnostic mindset, towards digitalization. Resulting in a context that will neither promote it nor devaluate it;

» Urban Future Scenarios: Clustering Tool



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• Future city scenarios; where one might expect a more connected, smarter city management approach. Resulting in a more pervasive adop-tion and a more seamless impact of digital lifestyles (Fast Forward Digitalization).

The resulting continuum is the first dimension of our analysis. The second dimension refers to the modality of “design direction” by city managers and/or archi-tects and/or other decision-makers, namely to the participatory involvement of citizens and stakehold-ers in co-creative and co-design practices. This is an indicator of how a city, as described within a certain scenario, would result in a context that impacts, or not, the traditional “city planning” modality, e.g. enabling new direct democracy or participatory design. The resulting second continuum highlights two extremes:

• a vertical structure of relationships and the managerial models adopted in a given future city that will be organized as “top-down”. This refers to centrally made decisions, based on deterministic and positivist research only, in-forming and forming political and economic agendas of lobbies and key stakeholders;

• an ecosystem of relationships and the design directions of a future city that will be organized to be “bottom-up”. Where, the key elements of strategies or policies or solutions are co-creat-ed, even crowdsourced at times, by citizens in participatory design modality, with a high level of (digital) inclusion and a high appreciation of diversity, e.g. alternative lifestyles but also proactively including immigrants, migrants and weaker segments of society.

It is important to reiterate how the two sets of param-eters; “Top Down/Bottom Up Design Direction” and “Rewind Digitalization/Fast Forward Digitalization” are intended as two polarities of a continuum, with the tool to be interpreted as a field of gradual possibilities.

The analysis enabled establishing a number of co-herent clusters leading to the sketching of two key conclusions:

• Firstly, it might be expected to map clusters of urban scenarios that will be smarter and more connected as a result of top down strategies and policies; contradictory, smartification might also be the result of a citizen/stakeholder push, as a natural process of informal adoption of connected devices and the emerging digital lifestyles that go with it.

• Secondly, a number of scenarios, whether co-created or designed as such, describe future urban contexts that will be neutral to digitali-zation. In the sense that they neither sketch a

context where the adoption of digital lifestyles will be enabled, nor one that will demote it. This might be a perfect example of how in the future, sustainability and connectivity might not necessarily find a common ground in a greener yet digital urban universe. Where there might still be the need for niches of prevalently analogue lifestyles, e.g. agricultural cities in-corporating a new craving for the countryside.

Starting from these two preliminary considerations, one might extend the analysis by presenting a number of coherent segments emerging from the above map-ping analysis, that were described below with specific naming identifiers:

• Top Right: a set of “hyper-connected Cities” or urban possibilities, which rely on more con-trolled - always extremely advanced - digitaliza-tion solutions to deliver on their promises of higher quality of life to citizens, visitors and knowledge migrants;

• Bottom-right: a set of “Participatory Smart Cit-ies”, where smartification is not the brainchild of its leadership (only), rather a co-created achievement of the “wisdom of the crowd”; enabled by genuine dialog and contribution by citizens, temporary citizens (e.g. tourists, visitors, short term expats) and immigrants of all kinds;

• Neutrality Zone: a set of scenarios of “Neutral tech Cities” where, either by collective fate or by choice, contextual conditions will be agnostic towards digitalization;

• Top-left: a cluster of urban futures describing possible “System Cities” that by design will be less focused on urban connectivity;

• Bottom-left: the outliers, “hyper-natural Cities”, which might pursue an aggressive de-smart-ification agenda or where digital connectiv-ity might not be a priority in terms of either political leadership or grassroots movement viewpoints, or both.

The above scenario clusters offer a synthesis of how urban futures might meet digital evolutions of media and platforms, from smart phones to smart cities. It is not the purpose to sketch a roadmap or even less to determine a range of quality. On the contrary, we consider the adoption of technologies from an agnostic and neutral perspective, as a city might be livable or not beyond its adoption of smart solutions.



FROM ARISTOCRATS TO GREAT CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY, OVER CENTURIES AND ACROSS CONTINENTS, LUxURY VARIED IN TERMS OF MODALITIES OF ExPRESSION BUT ALWAYS REMAINED AS AN ENGINE OF ASPIRATION AND A DOMAIN OF ExCELLENT CRAFTSMANSHIP AND TECHNICAL ExCELLENCE.

With the industrial revolution, the emancipation of workers and of women, and with the democratization of advanced economies that followed the dark years of WWII, luxury morphed into mass luxury and the allocation of premium value to symbols, solutions and services shifted, following new social and cultural movements. Styling has been and still is the great interpreter translating people’s desires with tangible ideas and feasible experiences. Alternative lifestyles contributed propelling the luxury and premium imagi-nary with an overflowing series of dreams and signs, from counterculture feeding Radical Design in the 1960’s to grunge feeding haute couture in the 1990’s. From New York, the new global capital after 1945, to London, from Milan to more European cities across the Union, urban culture has been the stage where this great play took place. Therefore, urban futures is the context where projections, anticipations and hypotheses might be best formulated to understand where luxury and premium are going.

With the growing diversity of premium and luxury sectors, which span a wide array of service offerings and consumable and durable product categories, our quest to analyze future impact on consumption must address the nuances of specific sub-categories1. We therefore chose to divide this research universe in three categories where solutions are clustered ac-cording to their product sectors:

1. Consumables: products, which are perishable and have a limited shelf life; they represent

1 For the definition of the Luxury Goods Market and its com-ponent, we refer to the Worldwide Luxury at a Glance by Altagamma, Italy, by then clustering the sub-sectors accord-ing to their sectors

the upper-end of the fast-moving consumer products. This cluster includes wines, beer and spirits, as well as gourmet and premium food products, in addition to personal care and fragrances. Most importantly, this set refers to consumable retail channels (both on- and off-line) as opposed to their consumption at point of sale (e.g., spas, bar, lounges, hotel), which is covered beneath the umbrella of services.

2. Durables: including jewelry, fashion, automo-tive, yacht, jets, interior design and consumer electronics. With the increasing Service reori-entation and Smartification of this group, a necessary caveat is the increasing bundle of product / digital ecosystem / services. From our perspective, this cluster also includes, as a natural extension, services, that are enabled by connected devices, wearable technology and upcoming virtual and augmented reality. But for simplicity we decided to primarily focus on the material dimension as objects of products in this section, whereas we explore the impact, if any, on the services in the following subset. For example, specific trends to a connected car, which consumers might be willing to purchase, belong to the durable sub-set, whereas trans-portation, car-sharing and Uber-like services belong to the next group.

3. Services: the last group is the domain of ser-vices, by including hotel, restaurants, cafes, or spas and lounges, and traditional limos as much as digitally enhanced cab-hailing ap-plications. While there is a wide overlap, in terms of product offering, between this group and the previous two, there are nuances which compel a differentiation. First and foremost, the set standpoint is the one of the service/ experience (e.g., letting a renowned bartender prepare a cocktail vs. purchasing the cocktail ingredients). Moreover, there is the perspective of the service production as a channel, which often requires specific formats (e.g., increasing

The “Blur” and luxury/premium consumptionHistorically, luxury is a by-product of urban culture, as it was born in royal courts and spread through capital cities, first, and through regional centers of commerce and industry, as the offspring of class dynamics within vertically structured societies.


THE “BLUR” AND LUxURY/PREMIUM CONSUMPTION

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consumption of premium draft beer in restau-rants and bars).

Before introducing the summary of our assessment, we must address the meaning of bearing of a scenario over the category. We have chosen to represent such influence through the so-called “Harvey Balls”, by focusing on a 5-point scale:

• highest/100%: we posit that in this case the specific given urban scenario is the main change trigger for the category innovation, branding and commercial strategy. While there might be other factors, and trends, the urban scenario is by far the most important.

• high/75%: we posit that the specific given urban future scenario is one of the top 3 trends affecting the category.

• Medium/50%: while the specific given urban scenario has some bearing on the category, we posit it is not one of the dominant triggers of change.

• Low/25%: in this case, the specific given future scenario might affect the category but only on a secondary level.

• Lowest/No impact/0%: in this case we posit that the specific given urban future scenario is not impacting at all, it is neutral towards the dynamics of innovation, branding and com-merce of a specific category.

Having defined the tool and the analytical interpreta-tion of data sets through its frame, we operated on earlier findings and reflection in two waves of dialog. Firstly, designed to explore a draft overview of pre-

liminary findings, then aimed at sharing a pertinent selection of such preliminary findings with experts, opinion formers and thought leaders in 23 interviews and dialogs.

The “So-What”

With the below notes, we aim at making explicit some key findings in terms of the above quali-quantitative assessment. We pursue this goal with further opera-tionalization of future insights translated into a set of “Recommendations”, one per category. By means of this essential, but intentionally actionable, reporting we intend to suggest how the key use of this paper, and the research behind it, lies within the possibility to convert findings into change, by designing future steps and defining next strategies.

Wines and Spirits

As luxury is transforming beyond the mere consump-tion of products, we expect such long-term trends of “consumption reduction” to influence the universe of Wines and Spirits. Moreover, the dynamics of tech-nological sophistication will mostly translate into an e-commerce enabled return to craft, tailor-made, small-batch production, that fit not only the roots of a brand and the place of origin of its products, but also, and more importantly, collaborations with celebrities, chefs, restaurants, artists, cultural opinion leaders and even locations. And while the latter is not a novelty in Wines and Spirits, it will become more common currency and less of a marketing showcase. This will also happen under the effect of the “Blur”, which will challenge the traditional notion of consumption oc-

Consumables •  Wines and Spirits •  Food & Bev •  Personal Care Durables •  Jewelry / Watches •  Fashion & Acces. •  Transportation •  Interior Design •  Other Accessories •  Electronics Services •  Transport •  Hotel •  Restaurant/ Cafes •  Other

No Impact High Impact

Hyper Connected

Cities

Participatory Smart Cities

Neutral Tech

Cities

System Cities

Hyper Natural Cities

» Impact of Urban Scenarios on Premium and Luxury Categories



casion, making it impossible for brands to compete, as they have done in the past decades, in the impor-tant transition moments of the day and the week, as well as, during core occasions of refreshment, meals, bonding and so on.

In the context of this urban consumption model, not surprisingly, we expect the Wines and Spirits industry to be most impacted by Neutral Tech city scenarios, which fall mostly within the socio – cultural driver of Belonging. These are technological agnostic civic communities, which foster local initiatives, with locally sourced products and locally manufactured goods. This is the same driver behind the rapid diffusion of gourmet-street-food and the craft beer phenomena: open-air farmer markets, local and regional fairs for showcasing and testing, organic products, sustainable farming and foreign recipes with a local twist.

While scenarios related to Hyper Connected Cities have no measurable impact on the Wines and Spirits category, the remaining three tech clusters have a small bearing on this sector. The scenarios highlighted in Participatory Smart Cities, because of the underly-ing strength of the Identity driver, which is and will be an important social driver for the category. The scenarios clustered as System Cities, because of the weight of the local dimension in the city’s strategy and the Hyper Natural city scenarios, whose approach to sustainability slightly constrains the category.

recommendation: Companies in Wines and Spirits should start preparing for supply chains where econom-ics depend less on the high numbers of repetitions, whilst starting to build sensory networks leading the decision with whom they should be co-creating their products.

Food and Beverages

This industry has a similar profile to the Wines and Spir-its. We expect that this is true because of the gradient between the current present and the expected future of these two industries. Regulators and producers self-imposed regulations have changed the commu-nication profile of wines and spirits in the past 10-15 years; drink and driving awareness, healthcare risks related to abuse, pregnancy, under-age consumption, and more and more countries limiting if not banning the advertising of hard liquors. This change has yet to happen to the processed food industry, which has been forced to add nutrients’ information on labels, which is hardly understandable or actionable for most of the population.

recommendation: Companies in Food and Beverages should also start preparing for supply chains whose economics depend less on the high numbers of rep-etitions. Together with the mainstream craft-itization of food and beverages, they should expect to have less opportunities of relying on advertising to build their brands.



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Personal Care

Only two of the five clusters impact this industry, and while the bearing of Participatory Smart City scenarios on the sector is average, we posit that the impact of System City scenarios on personal care will be rather above average. In essence, within those urban scenarios, lifestyles will force a less connected, more natural and more organic selection of materials and ingredients, by design. This will challenge the cur-rent business model of personal care, by requiring a stretch in the way the products are developed, pack-aged and distributed. This scenario, within the scope of expectations resulting from our expert interviews, translates into a return of traditional business mod-els and retail channels. For example, there are many similarities with the pharmacies of the xx century: re-usable containers, bulk sales, tailor-made mixes/ dosages based on customers characteristics. Even more considering the hybridization of retail, we could expect personal care brands products to be discovered and trialed2 in pop-up stores or travelling kiosks, with subsequent and following purchases made on-line, through the facilitation of algorithms or AI-based personal assistants.

recommendation: Personal care companies should engage more closely in business model innovation, by relying less on modern trade chains and more on personal discovery of brands and products. The risk of being made irrelevant by purchasing algorithms related to AI should not be underestimated.

2 In this case trial, or first purchase

Jewelry and Watches

In this industry, the seed of what is yet to come is already quite evident. Under the pressure of the emer-gence of the “Blur”, both at technological and social level, two opposite trends are in the making. On the one hand, the smartification of jewels and watches, which from a pure technological stand point is com-moditizing the industry. In a nutshell, the smartifica-tion is the watch manufacturers decision of which of the available operating systems to select, and which of the available processors to work with. Most smart watches or smart jewels will offer a very limited choice of CPU/ OS combinations, hence leveling the play-ing field among brands with different technological heritages. And it is in this context, that brand driven innovation will play a pivotal role in the survival of the brand itself. Producers will need to work together with experience designers and leading edge consumers to translate their brand values, roots and personality into a number of consumer relevant applications, only available through their digital ecosystems. This is in line with the recent attempt of Louis Vuitton, who launched a 2,900 USD Tambour Horizon smart watch - based on Google Android - which offers exclusive brand content and experiences for the owners3.

On the other hand, producers and customers will enjoy more and more craft watches, in many cases highly-customized-to-order. This might even give birth to new niche kinds of co-design. Even in this case we can expect the raising of a digital ecosystem, where brands and design will license their intellectual property, in the form of a logo, an iconic signature, a graphic design theme. Manufacturers will be ready

3 Source: CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/11/louis-vuitton-smartwatch-costs-2900.html



to craft these tailor-made elements, by adding their specific technological savoir faire and customers will be co-designing, through finite choices or self-made uploaded choices, their own watches, before ordering them for craft production. A sort of hybrid development of etsy.com, NikeID.com and artisanal services. In these cases, a creative outburst by the brand and its ability to connect with relevant proposition to consumers will be key assets in moving forward, profitably.

The above-mentioned macro trends will be exacerbated by two technology clusters of urban scenarios: System Cities and Hyper Connected Cities. We expect the first to constrain the selection of materials and themes of the industry. Whereas, the second will drive, in particular, the smartification by imposing to a certain extent the digital experience of the city itself on the brand experience within this industry.

recommendation: Luxury and Jewelry companies should first and foremost develop open innovation ecosystems, on one end to ensure their technological choice fit with most up-and-coming ecosystems and on the other end, to collaborate with a broader, and eventually more differentiating, set of partners in the software/hardware arena. Finally, players in these sectors, should open their brands to their customers and initiate meaningful two way conversations with their consumers. From which to extract ideas for (co-)development of unique, brand-centric, customer-relevant, digital experiences.

Fashion and Accessories

While the world of fashion has always been keen in creatively trying new approaches4, and while the retail side of function is clearly suffering the growth of a digital shopping component, the industry modus operandi has not changed in almost 5 decades. Nev-ertheless, the emergence of celebrity bloggers and instragrammers, who combine luxury codes, yet have mass-market popularity, and whose monetization is anything but clear, it is a clear promise of challenging the way fashion and accessory brands are built today. Moreover, we do not foresee, in the near future, the adoption of intelligent and smart materials. In other words, we don’t posit that fashion will be catapulted in to an ambient living system yet. While we expect to see more and more examples of brand attempting the link we don’t suppose these brands will have the transformational power required to disrupt the fash-ion industry. Nevertheless, we expect them to inspire

4 Fashion houses have, in the past decade, co-designed collections with artists, co-created them with consumers, co-branded them, lent their designers to design lines for external brands, cross-distributed brands, and of course licensed their brands to lifestyle categories.

future generations of designers into challenging, even more, the status quo.

Beyond what is happening in retail, we expect the System City cluster scenarios to heavily impact the choices of designers and how far a style builds on a city-relevant experience.

recommendation: Fashion and accessories makers will have to realize that purchasing algorithms are the new standard. That hybrid retail experiences will be emerging more and more and that the physical experiences in store will be likely to represent life/death sentences for the brands. In the last decades, stores have already become cathedrals to the brand. They will further increasingly develop educational platforms for their product innovations, while the long term commercial experience most-likely will be digital.

Transportation

Within this cluster, three major segments are present: automotive, private aviation and yachting. These three segments share at least three relevant aspects: they have a dominant design, which is at least five decades old; their innovation has been mostly focused on electronics and not mechanics and by reducing the impact on performance but improving the safety and the delivery of the service; experience and connectivity play a pivotal role in the future. The main challenge, in order to assess future scenarios, lies in the antiquity of the dominant design, which makes each of the seg-ments ripe for disruption. We would normally expect that a game changer is going to happen in the next 5-10 years. And this hypothesis is supported by the many players from outside the automotive industry, which are attempting to get a piece of the connected car segment. In addition to that, more and more countries are announcing bans on internal combustion engines, which will have to be replaced by more sustainable energy solutions.

Beyond the question mark of the dominant design, Hyper Natural City scenarios, with the aggressive pur-suit of their de-smartification agenda, will impose a 180-degrees change to electronics based innovation for the industry: beyond the safety and security related elements of connectivity, these city scenarios will impose a vintage concept of automotive, yachting and private air transportation. Where luxury is equivalent to being disconnected rather than the opposite. quite similarly, scenarios clustered as Neutral Tech Cities will promote an agnostic sense of smartification, albeit cars, yachts and the like will be key to either showcase a sense of belonging to the community or to stage a personal quest of inner and outer exploration.



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On the other end of the spectrum, within scenarios clustered as Participatory Smart Cities, there will be more and more reliance on personal and shared vehicles to build a better res publica, by promoting more Vehicle-to-Vehicle connectivity, data sharing and deep learning. The push for smartification will aim at making our own luxury experience better, while sharing the benefits with a broader community.

recommendation: Transport producers should com-plement their technological push with participatory platforms, to truly re-design their products around future consumption. Whether this will be more or less digital, more or less connected, more or less smart, it will be irrelevant unless producers can establish a deep, relevant co-design platform with end-users.

Interior Design

When the concept of ambient intelligence was cre-ated at the beginning of 2000 it was expected that many of today’s IOT hubs, controllers, and routers would hide in plain sight in everyday objects5. Nearly twenty years later consumers associate the dream of a super-connected home to a physical space where the electronic gear necessary for the connectivity is embedded in objects, part of our space, selected for their functionality but based on our taste and our

5 Insight validated on a proprietary co-creation session ex-ecuted for a consumer electronics client in Barcelona, July 2017.

preference in design. This would also mean a de-clut-tering of consumer electronics (which we will present in the relevant chapter) with certain functionalities being imported and seamlessly integrated into e.g., furniture, paint, carpets and so on.

Based on these insights, we posit that the industry will be forcefully impacted in certain urban scenarios. For example, in scenarios related to Participatory Smart City players will promote personal data sharing and collection, with a shared collective purpose.

recommendation: Similar to Luxury and Jewelry com-panies, interior designers and producers should aim at entering open innovation ecosystems. This to meet consumer electronics partners to solve the problem of hiding technology in plain sight. While doing so, they should also find complementary brand partners, with whom they can associate in a compelling and relevant way, vis-à-vis competitors, customers and end-users.

Consumer Electronics

Before the “Blur”, the technological blurring boundaries resulted in the multiplication of devices, rather than a real converge to less devices. With the emergence of the smartphone, a new world also manifested with tablets, hybrid laptop / tablets and a new generation of mobile and handheld devices. Similarly, while smart-phone have evolved into the main devices and the leading sources of visual content, images and pictures, they have not put out of business digital cameras, which have evolved in more sophisticated, multi-lens point-and-shoot or towards semi-professional DLSRs. Moreover, with the emergence of IOT, while many more devices are now connected (e.g., light bulbs, clocks, thermostat, appliances…) a new breed of consumer lifestyle devices is entering homes within advanced economies and, when leapfrogging, emerging econo-mies: hubs, controllers, adapters, AI assistants, and so on. Both of these trends are contributing to a further cluttering of our spaces by physical devices with very limited life span. Whereas, consumers look forward to real convergence on the technological side, especially on the side of the connected-home.

Within the above-mentioned context, it is intuitive to appreciate the relevance of these dynamics within scenarios clustered as Participatory Smart Cities. These will have an effect on consumer electronics design, especially with their relationship with the cloud and the mining of the data they generate or collect, always within the context of shared collective purpose.

recommendation: Consumer Electronics manufacturers need to envision a future where their business model relies less on the sales of items and more on the rev-enues from licensing their Intellectual Property. We



recommend that they accelerate or start to working closely, in open innovation consortia, with fashion and interior designers and co-develop consumer centric, relevant, solutions, which can enhance both brands.

Transport Services

Among the various sectors offering urban services transport is one of the most affected by the “Blur”. This is due to the fact that each urban/tech cluster sets clear rules and limits to digitalization and participa-tion, either as individuals or as collectivity.

In scenarios clustered as Hyper-connected cities, ex-periences, services and digital apps will merge as one. Transport services will rely on most advanced city-wide algorithms of AI to mine large datasets generated in real-time to optimize the experience based on people preferences, their tailor made-set parameters and their own AI assistants. This is the scenario where not only routes and mobility methods change from start to end-destination. Also, activities will be scheduled as based on current traffic information, expected traf-fic forecast and anticipated needs of people. Traffic management will be key. Most urban transport will be shared and managed centrally and while different price segments with different types of services might emerge, in most cases it will be centrally organized.

quite similarly Participatory Smart City scenarios also rely on an equivalent level of digitalization. However, they leverage a sharing economic approach, through co-created choices and genuine contributions of all inhabitants and visitors to the city. This is the dream scenario for Uber-like applications. More will emerge not only with the ability of delivering us from point to point, but also with the ability to couple transport demand and offer based on e.g., dating or business networking profiles, movie and/or music interests.

On a more neutral position vis-à-vis previous the two clusters, we find scenarios within Neutral Tech and System Cities, which by fate or by choice will be either agnostic or less focused on connectivity. In the first one, the main commonality, beyond the tech neutrality, is the sense of belonging, which will be manifested in the forming of communities of kindred spirits. In this cluster, transportation services will be redesigned to serve the purpose of the community but also to embody its DNA. In this sense, this evolution will not segment customers by level of service. Secondly, in the scenario cluster of System Cities, transport services will need to reflect the strong focus on iconic / infrastructural city strategies (the city as “place”). Here, transport will be a key differentiating dimension.

Lastly, Hyper-natural cities and their scenarios will not only pursue an aggressive de-smartification but

also a very militant sustainable agenda by enforcing non-polluting transportation methods, shared services and healthier lifestyles. This will demand a re-design of mobility solutions, sometimes leading to digital connectivity even replacing physical transportation.

recommendation: Pointless to say, a globally stan-dardized strategy would not apply for this sector and this already highlights how the whole “smart city” discourse as dictated by IT companies might be more marketing jargon than social demand. A case by case approach needs to be detailed on the basis of local constraints, level of digitalization required and city strategies according to the genius loci and the vernacular character of the city. Nevertheless, as a common trait, an empathic design approach, which reverts the process by starting from the end-user, will always result in better results, independently from the scenario, the cluster or the technological dynamics.

Hotels

The hospitality industry has been greatly changing dur-ing the past 25 years under the effects of digitalization. Firstly, the emergence of on-line travel agencies and then meta-search engines which have re-shaped the distribution of hotel booking upstream. Urban lodging has also seen a spike in short-term rentals available online, being a very typical complement to hotels in touristic cities. In recent years, under the effects of the sharing economy, the emergence of platforms like AirBnB is potentially transforming any apartment in a city into a lodging opportunity. This also had a very negative effect on gentrification and livability of city centers, from Amsterdam to Matera, the Italian town designated as European Capital of Culture 2019. There is therefore an opportunity with an intrinsic challenge. Despite this, the hotel industry has failed to change their business model. They have slightly changed their offering, tried to appeal to different demographics, become environmental and health conscious. Yet their business model today, is still the same as a hundred years ago. The question is clear: for how long is this still sustainable?

With regards to our analysis, scenarios clustered within Hyper Connected City and Participatory Smart City scenarios will drive highly blurred hotel solutions. Where technology will be a key enabler of the blurred lifestyle. Hotels will not be able to segment their customers anymore, as based on whether they are business or leisure guest, because they will increas-ingly be both, at the same time, sometimes during different times of the same day. People will expect a seamless connection to their office, their entertain-ment, their private cloud, and they will expect this in both digital as well as in functional and physical terms. A main difference between these two scenario



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clusters lies in the fact that the latter will be based on a more co-created experience, on what we refer to as sharing economy. In the latter room deliveries and content will also be potentially crowdsourced, with rather a big impact on the hotels’ revenues models. But for both, most of the booking choices, unless consumers find a really relevant and differentiating brand, will be made –once again- by algorithms based on customer preferences, previous experiences and their willingness to be engaged.

In the other three urban cluster scenarios, the “Blur” will represent a lesser impact or even be paused by choice. This will augment the possibilities for a new role of the hotel being developed, as a social and cultural center; a site from where the urban journey begins and ends.

recommendation: Hotel owners have already started learning about the “Blur” and some co-create innova-tive, relevant and sustainable business models. Priority should be given to a concept of hospitability that is reconfigurable and modular and that could intelligently adapt to their new blurred lifestyles.

Restaurants and Cafes

The globalization of premium Wines and Spirits played a pivotal role in the development of a premium and super-premium because a certain selection of brands provides owners with the right to charge a premium. This is however not intrinsically differentiating, and therefore alone, it makes for a very short shelf life

span. Hence the focus on mixology, which is a ritual elevating both the product and the experience, and it is an opportunity to show-off the repertoire while at the same time providing a twist (e.g., by revisiting classical recipes with new ingredients). This need for differentiation translates into two parallel trends. On one hand, the re-discovery of very old and super-premium formulations, which initially lost the battle with larger and more diffused categories. On the other hand, the following of the craft beer phenomenon, the emergence of small-batch, limited edition and custom-distilled products.

In this context, premium bars, restaurants and cafes are already physical spaces where leisure and work mingle and where barriers are blurring. Of course, from a digital point of view, we can envision a future devel-opment where, in the context of extreme availability of data, the general preferences of the customer, the competences of the mixologist, the available ingredi-ent, and the current mood, are matched to a perfect choice, selected, quite naturally, by an algorithm. And while this possibility is real, and there might be instances for it, we expect it to be quite the exception, rather than the rule.

recommendation: Owners of bars, cafes and restau-rants should start embracing the open innovation revolution and scout potential producers of tailor-made, limited availability products. While we expect the emergence of middle-men between premium on-premise and premium unbranded products, we



also believe that larger companies might find busi-ness models that play at the heart of this ecosystem.

The above notes should be considered conclusive of the research process that started by critically reviewing consolidated urban scenarios from the perspectives of technological impact and luxury / premium categories. They were designed to create a few innovative, if not disruptive, relationships across the various sets of parameters and paradigms. The ideal next step might be to launch specified sectorial projects and build a reference expert panel for every category, in order to further sharpen these preliminary insights, revisit their foundation and deepen the dialog with the industry leaders and opinion formers. Ultimately, specialist scenarios might be sketched and developed into in-novation concepts. As this might be the object of a further editorial project the conclusions of this paper were extracted and rationalized from the 23 interviews we conducted at the moment of consolidating the research process and of testing our preliminary desk research findings. It is therefore natural to provide a helicopter view and a synthesis of what we could learn in this treasured round of dialogs. Sharing ideas and absorbing visionary viewpoints from an eclectic selection covering designers, architects, consultants, enterprise leaders, editorial directors, chief marketing officers and selected on the basis of their affinity with the luxury / premium perspective and/or their insight in to digital challenges or urban futures.

ConclusionsAs an overall conclusion, after elaborating on the various categories of consumables, durables and services, and the different impact derived from the rise of the “Blur” from a category point of view, there are some key learning points. We identified such key conclusions of this research process in a selection of 15 unrelated statements, derived from our expert dialogs and therefore each inspiring as a possible point of departure for new explorations: The “Blur” is pervasive, as enabled by social media and digital communication devices, that are key enablers for multitasking, measuring performance and providing feedback to adjust performance. The “guru” of the future is not an entrepreneur or a trendwatcher but it is the robot that keeps people up to date daily. Removing the need to do scanning and leaving the human element central with creativity and with vision, like a philosopher reflecting on life.

By robot and ICT, human labor is not necessary any-more, so we need to rethink the relationship leisure / work. There is a huge problem in the economy with the division work / leisure, as work gets less optimiz-ing production processes. However, work should be meaningful and fulfilling; it should be respected as a generative moment and not only as a productive mo-ment. When seen in this perspective, labor as plain money-making is fundamentally corrupted.

One cannot speak of “work” and “leisure” in the same way as we used to do before the “Blur”. Mobile tech-nology in Asia has impacted both retail (with luxury customers who expect to be connected 24/7 to staff via WhatsApp, Twitter or chat) as well as business communication, e.g., WeChat being the new format in China. As a result, there is a continuum where time-tables apply less and less. At the same time, Millennials will increasingly work on a project basis, with a set of motivations that is unknown to management, e.g., the need to feel intrapreneurs and be given access to resources through in-company accelerators for innova-tion. Additionally, “being Millennial” will increasingly be a state of mind, beyond generational boundaries.

At the same time, at a societal level, there will be too many people with too high financial resources who might jeopardize the market for less affluent people. This is something that institutions and organizations will have to fix or it will put the markets at risk. In the context of FinTech and beyond, the blockchain phe-nomenon, enabling BitCoin and all virtual currency, will democratize access to wealth and challenge the exclusive power of regulators. This could be a way to create an alternative monetary system, addressing the challenge. It is digital, it innovates categories that seemed eternally static, it presents challenges



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in terms of interpretation and ethics and therefore it might stimulate a whole new field of reflections and the emergence of new frameworks.

In the digital flows, with the help of algorithms and AI assistants, re-purchase dynamics will be automatically executed. Goods that need to be physically delivered will find their way to new shopping locations, e.g. home or pick-up places, depending on the preference and the nature of the shopping trip (as today in travel retail you can purchase in-flight and get delivered at home, or purchase on-line and get delivered in flight). Retail and e-commerce will be intertwined in this dynamic of trial and repeat, each one playing a role. Reliance on aggressive price promotions of certain categories will lead them to a commoditization in a way that, lost the relevance from a shopper point of view, algorithms will be making re-purchase decisions based on past baskets and current prices.

The emergence of the “Blur”, as filtered through tech-nological impact and categories, already had a drastic impact on services. Unlike products, services are a key component of the future urban model, and as such they are very likely to be redefined because of the different urban scenarios. We are confident that in most cases services will need to reinvent them-selves in the future. The relationship between people and brands is stretching and coming close to its own disruption. There are new media formats, by which reputable publishers are replaced by bloggers who engage a mass audience with luxury codes. Likewise, small size craftsman firms might reach international

market and establish themselves as global brands. In general, if brands do not transform, e-commerce and AI (starting from Alexa, Siri, Cortana) will take over the ambassadorship and stewardship roles that were played by brands in the last Century. Remote and virtual transactions become more and more relevant, with e commerce becoming the new branding.

Innovation will increasingly be conducted with people at the center of the focus, not engineering priorities or technology for the sake of technology. Blackberry invented a new category and lost it because it was not capable in understanding its socio-cultural mean-ing and potential. Nevertheless, innovation will also continue at the same time to work on a top down basis, e.g., Formula 1/Formula E providing solutions that will trickle down to mainstream makers. This is because innovation will still require the critical mass of investment to progress on scientific terms, justifying a premium pricing point. Moreover, what Philip Kotler defined as sustainable imperative, plays a role in certain scenarios more than others: and this is especially taken into account in its bearing towards FMCG categories. This will continue and increase in speed and intensity.

Luxury / premium will increasingly be about time control and freedom and not about products or mate-rial possessions. Education, wellness, healthcare, the quality of dieting and food selection, the possibility to take half a year or one year off as a bucket list project will be luxury markers much more than outdated status symbols, e.g., Louis Vuitton in China.



Luxury / premium will increasingly be about techno-logical sophistication, with luxury brands who will give up their intent to leap forward and leapfrog Apple / Android to either reaffirm a traditional niche, e.g., the mechanical sublime of collector items like cars or watches or design pieces that elevate themselves to the status of collectibles; or to redefine themselves by connecting with the new lifestyles e.g., hotels for digital natives and nomads that merge business and wellness functionalities in new formats. Most of all, luxury / premium will dynamically change its meaning to fit with the next socio-cultural frameworks of values and norms. On the one hand, in an age of relative abundance, it might be worth exiting the “share of wallet” modality of positioning. On the other hand, licensing and partnerships might give way to new propositions. Under the condition that all business stakeholders involved have clear and strong proposi-tions and positions in their markets. Weak partners will not be in a condition to form strong alliances by joining forces.

Although the world of retail as we know it will deeply change, if not end, retail functions will be transferred along the value chain. While it is possible that retail will become purely digital we believe that is unlikely. As hybrid models are emerging in travel retail, it is likely that hybrid models will also be emerging in traditional, premium and luxury retail. The physical stores, where consumers can experience brands, dis-cover products and receive a first level of education about both. In stores, people will take their shopping decisions and develop a preference for one brand or one product line.

Research will have to be kept as a very open process, such as medical research being organized in order to also capture and formalize collateral effects. Almost all medical findings and inventions are collateral. In the same way, research processes should go beyond the deterministic control of productivity, to engage in cycles of trial and error. Where failure and success are equivalent in their contribution with data sets and insights to the creation and valorization of knowledge, for business application. Industry, academia and managerial sciences have defined the architecture of both corporate departments as well as the ideology that goes with it. It appears that both digital innova-tion and people have evolved much faster, with the result that lot of what we currently have as reference is irrelevant. As a consequence, there is a cultural chasm between most brands and people. The solution lies in ecosystem thinking, with research capabilities being reoriented to qualitative competences, beyond the adoption of statistics.

In combination with the sector-specific “Recommenda-tions” above these 15 unrelated yet powerful state-

ments represent the essence of what distilled from dialogs, both interviews and informal discussions, with the selected contributors and therefore the furthest point we could reach at this time, with this paper. Our main aim was not to build a city but to explore a regional territory. To identify in the changing land-scape of digital transformation and of post-modern consumption, new stimuli and innovative directions for the luxury / premium sectors and categories. We elaborated and posited the “Blur” as the unifying fac-tor and common denominator to describe a number of apparently unrelated phenomena, that we identify instead as part of the common horizon of midterm futures, with a 5/10 year-scope.



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BEVOLO, M. ROSENIUS, T. (2014), Create the Livable City, London, AJ Books/ EMAP

BEVOLO, M., GOFMAN, A., MOSKOWITZ, H. (2011), Premium by Design, UK, Gower

BEVOLO, M. (2009), The Golden Crossroads, UK, Palgrave

CASTELLS, M. (2009), Communication Power, Oxford, New York

CASTELLS, M. (2012), Networks of Outrage and Hope , Cambridge, UK, Polity

DE RIDDER, W. (2014), De ontdekking van de toekomst , Deventer

DE RIDDER, W. (2012), De strategische revo-lutie , Deventer

FLUSSER, V. (1999, 2009, 2010), The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design , London, UK, Reaktion Books

FRY, T. (2011), Design as Politics , Oxford, UK, Berg

FRY, T. (2009), Design Futuring , Oxford, UK, Berg

KOTLER, P., 2010. Marketing 3.0 : From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, USA.

KOTLER, P., 2011. Reinventing Marketing to Manage the Environmental Imperative. Jour-nal of Marketing 75, 132–135.

LEE, S.M., OLSON, D.L., 2010. Convergenomics: Strategic Innovation in the Convergence Era. Gower Publishing, Ltd.

RUBIN, R. (2010), Design and Truth, New Ha-ven/ London, Yale University Press

JULIER, G. (2000), The Culture of Design, Lon-don, UK, Routledge

KNOx, P. (2011), Cities and Design, London, UK, Rouledge

KUOSA, T. (2012), The Evolution of Strategic Foresight, UK, Gower

MARZANO, S. (Ed.) (2005), Past Tense, Future Sense, Amsterdam

MARZANO, S. (1998), Creating Value by Design. Thoughts+Facts, Blaricum, V+K

MOROZOV, E. (2013), To save everything, click. The folly of technological solutionism, New York, PublicAffairs

POTSMA, A., YEOMAN, I., OSKAM, J. (2013), The Future of European Tourism, Leeuwarden, Stenden University of Applied Sciences

STERLING, B. (2005), Shaping Things, Cam-bridge, MT, MIT Press

THORNTON, S. (2008), Seven Days in the Art World, New York, US / London, UK

VON HIPPEL, E., EUCHNER, J., 2013. User In-novation. Research Technology Management 56, 15.

Bibliographic References


BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

Urban Future Scenarios

Scenario 1 – Liquid City

This scenario describes a mobile, dynamic condition with an increased quantity and quality of opportunities. Whilst accounting for the stress, fear, and social risk highlighted in our post-industrial, advanced econo-mies. It is an extension of a globalized, market-driven world where public welfare and sociocultural ties are minimized. The ‘Liquid City’ follows a generalized technocratic approach to city management with the goal of liberating enterprise and enabling individuals to perform. To support this individual focus structures inside the city may become neutral boxes; ‘skins’ to host the perpetual motion of new functions and industry. As a counter-balance it will be essential to comple-ment the highly-personalized leisure and dwelling programs with flexible ‘studios’ which include leisure activities that might appeal to the new independent professionals and entrepreneurs facing the pressure of this scenario. A key challenge will be to combine redesign and flexibility with identity management. Future liquid spaces will require deep roots to com-pensate for the lack of security and structure, such as pedestrian and green spaces.

Scenario 2 – Brandscape City

As an alternative and possible evolution of conven-tional brand marketing, ‘Imagineering’, the approach to theme park design and event management pioneered by Disney, can be seen as a principle for a new kind of commercial urban design. At policy level a completely de-regulated organizational arrangement on the ex-ploitation rights for urban advertising space might have already been proven to create a fragmented city landscape, difficult for the municipal departments to steer and manage the related process. A consolidation step towards long-term relationships with strategic partners might help to create a coherent and consis-tent ‘look and feel’ for citizens and visitors to enjoy, at the same time ensuring freedom of enterprise for

advertisers and marketers. However, such consolidation will not be enough; innovation in business modeling and in the merging of aesthetics from fine arts, urban design and marketing communication will increasingly be required to activate the city from a commercial viewpoint. This innovative approach might ultimately lead to a people-centered adoption of commercially-driven design strategies.

Scenario 3 – Eclectic City

While ‘Zeitgeist’, the spirit of the age, may be a driving force of aesthetics and architecture following culture while at the same time materializing it and visualizing its future. It could be argued that the adoption of these principles has resulted in an aesthetically sanitized ‘Unmodern Architecture.’ The opportunity to react and move forward and beyond the risks of conservative design strategies such as the ones described above lies in the challenge of generating architectural in-novativeness. Namely, a new ‘visionary eclecticism’ at aesthetic level, with the objective of bringing more diversity back into urban and suburban communities at an aesthetic and social level. For this to transpire beauty should be spread to all areas of development from urban centers to new settlements. To move past the bleak aesthetics of ‘Architecture of Fear,’ where buildings of 2017 look like they were built in 1817 and communicate a lack of hope for the future, the simple post-modern integration of older styles in new clusters of the ‘Eclectic City’ might offer the opportunity to reach forward and find a new spirit.

Scenario 4 – Open City

‘Openness’ does holistically involve all of us; none are excluded. Diversity is paramount as alternative lifestyle communities, migrants, refugees, and more all find their place in our urban futures. From the view-point of an accelerating strategy this seems a hugely relevant feature of cities. An ‘Open City’ is not to be confused with a security-driven, socially-sterilized, culturally homogeneous community. In open cities,

AnnexesAdditional input about the Urban Future Scenarios and the Research Methodology


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the urban texture requires the freedom for the city to become Socio-cultural research labs which may define tomorrow’s ‘new normal’ lifestyles. These cities will need to be truly open to new immigrants and by the necessity to move beyond the current income-biased paradigm of increasing diversity by means of urban gentrification as we currently know it. Where, the cre-ative class occupy these areas and cause changes in real-estate pricing and the social dynamics of place. Addressing inequality will increasingly require us to shift away from structural policies at macro level and address, instead, any unfair status quo at people’s level with the intention of entering into a pragmatic review of cause and effect.

Scenario 5 – Dialog City

In the past decades cities have been rethought from an ideological, administrative and commercial perspec-tive. In the future, as already seen in the ‘Open City’ scenario, it will be time to rethink our cities as the place where individuals live as citizens with respect for their rights, dignity, and memory of history; both personal and collective. It is in this field of ‘memory’ that one of the most important opportunities to inte-grate citizens, both new (migrants) and old (seniors) exists. Within the natural flow of their personal life individuals will constantly revisit the habits and the uses of their own cultural origin and personal histories to re-contextualize the., Adopting rituals and routines that might be different than what the city has seen in its recent past. These imported lifestyles, just like new flavors in a restaurant, are directly connected to individual roots and they contribute to re-defining how the city works and what the city is.

Scenario 6 – Repurposed City

Historic buildings are the framework of European cit-ies and they also represent an important legacy for the future, in spite of any expected or unexpected change of program, destination or use. As a natural consequence of such historic density and aesthetic continuity, urban places in Europe are not just build-ings of stone, steel and glass. They also constitute the basis for those collective perceptions that help us to read our society and give it meaning. Repurposing and reprogramming the heritage of our cities will translate into re-reading our history and translating it into fu-ture directions of new development, with the usual key distinction operating between hardware (bricks) and software (programs). Although one might expect total elasticity from the new functions and programs that will be adopted for repurposed buildings. The actual design of solutions for uses, occupancy and exploitation of historically relevant sites will have to offer the appropriate compromises between lifestyle innovation and architectural preservation, as a blank

slate approach will not be either culturally acceptable nor practically feasible inside Europe. These apparently conflicting principles of conservation and innovation might apply to whole new classes and typologies of building. This is evidenced in Europe which, has already witnessed the transition of churches from sacred sites to leisure or business uses. As well as the redesign of massive modernist industrial complexes into sites for new-economy studios and creative hubs for micro-enterprising. The rethinking of tourism as part of a larger mix of urban leisure is indeed one key trigger for this scenario to be kept under strong consideration. The challenge to be addressed in this scenario is, however, also to prevent or delay the conversion of European cities into what non-residents might perceive as ‘open-air museums’ for new incom-ing streams of visitors from the Middle East, the Far East and other booming economies

Scenario 7 – Regionalized City

The development of metropolitan regions has been a direction adopted across Europe by an increasing number of public policy makers and political stake-holders. This change has resulted in groupings of cities that are integrating functionally and economically, yet are differentiated. We are calling these groupings ‘cross-border metropolitan regions,’ with one example being the high-tech and pharmaceutical grouping of Leuven (Belgium), Aachen (Germany), and Eindhoven (The Netherlands). The concept can extend beyond pure geography as well, for example in the dynamics of exchange and interdependence between cities like Como (Italy) and Lugano (Switzerland). From a value creation perspective, an example can be made of re-gional conglomerations historically emerging around creative, artisan, and design districts; such as the ‘automotive design’ cluster in North-Western Italy or the ‘interior design cluster’ and ‘fashion design cluster’ in Lombardy, Italy. Within these metropolitan regions, administrative responsibilities and sometimes even national state borders are redefined to fit everyday practices like labor markets and business integration.

Scenario 8 – Geomantic City

In pure semantic terms, ‘geomancy’ is defined as the art of placing buildings auspiciously, with successful outcome. A new collective interpretation of ‘natural context’ to support shared understanding and mean-ing will be required to redefine the future relationship between the city and its natural planetary framework whether climatic, geographic, or geologic; by recon-necting the past with our urban futures. Because urban collective lifestyles are dynamically modified by changes in the environmental context (weather conditions and seasonal atmospheric dynamics), cities will change accordingly. Looking at climate


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change, priority will increasingly be given to renew-able energies in an effort to at least stabilize or slow down the dangers of global warming reaching its final tipping point. While wetter or dryer cities might require a different design approach the year 2050 is indicated by interviewed experts as the horizon dead-line to enact deep change at urban management level. However, there is more than climate change playing a key part in the geomantic quality of European cities. The ‘memorized awareness’ of potential phenomena like earthquakes and/ or similar catastrophic pos-sibilities should be likewise rethought in terms of an opportunity to define new urban futures for specific urban settlements positioned on sensible points of the European continent. Here also lies the major issue of water management for coastal cities, especially in the Northern regions of the Continent. Adaptability might ultimately inspire newly appropriate forms of urban design to be then translated and applied to more general lifestyle contexts, working according to the slow but relentless flow of ‘Big History’, beyond the mundane concerns of commercial fashion and economic opportunism.

Scenario 9 – Integrative City

With top priority being to radically rethink the prin-ciples, design and construction of new iconic spaces and objects with high symbolic value in European cities, the focus of this scenario is on the prevention and management of antagonism as expressed by di-verse urban subjects. This might potentially expand into addressing the dynamics of social protest and ultimately rebellion. In this scenario individuals and their personal visions of life are to be nurtured as the source of richness of our cities. When these processes of cultural recognition and political inclusion do not work, at least at minimal levels of democracy, com-munities might be formed across different interest groups in order to reclaim control. Minor places, minor practices will be paramount at the level of cultural integration and will be playgrounds for experiments in civic participation on low budgets. Grassroots ac-tivism, citizen involvement and open co-design at micro-decision level seem to be ways to rethink ur-ban politics towards a more human, more workable focus. Urban design focus has to shift from hardware to society, from pure accounting management to a genuine contribution to the quality of real life with an inclusive approach.

Scenario 10 – Augmented City

Starting with the introduction of CAD and similar tools to the design processes in the late 1900s the impact of the Digital Age on the design of our cities has already made a major difference within the architectural profes-sion. In the decade ahead digital tools will be central

to the architectural practice. Convergence between electronic media and the hardware of our European cities has already generated examples of ‘multilayered landscapes’ of augmented reality (AR), enriched by virtual objects that can be seen through smart phones and tablets. Fine arts, due to their research freedom, could be a pioneer in exploring digital applications and in connecting emerging digital lifestyles to city management. The next step might be in the direc-tion of people-driven IoT and e-design of the city service backbone, perhaps for health management and wellbeing purposes. In parallel, also already in progress in more cities, there will be an increase of entertainment applications that will meet the growing need for advanced communication tools. For example, addressing tourists and visitors in an innovative merge of services, information and purely aesthetic interac-tions designed to enrich both the real time as well as the vicarious experience of cities. In such context virtual signs will lead, on site, to memorable moments of immersion in the past of a place or in its future, as displayed on mobile screens.

Scenario 11 – Storytelling City

Behind the authentic reputation of every great city there is a greater story that people memorize and tell each other, in person or virtually. The strategic development of storytelling for the longer-term benefit of a city requires the ability to engage in a process of appraisal of existing assets against their potential reach into the future, addressing the question: what can be the future synthesis of ‘beauty with vision’? The existence of ‘heritage infrastructure’ and the cre-ation of new infrastructural hardware in the city, such as train stations, public buildings, green areas and similar communal ‘non-places’ has attracted a great deal of attention to the logistical backbone of ur-ban life and its potential meaning, well beyond ‘just’ beautification. Infrastructure is primarily designed according to existing ideas, its main purpose being to accentuate its function in its designated position within the city. In reality, infrastructure is much more than mere engineered function. It is about traffic management, energy management, public art, etc. In general terms, the theorizing of architecture as a ‘spatial agency’ focusing on informal processes and minor urban places is the best testimony of this emerging direction in urban design. The most effec-tive trigger for this storytelling renaissance of the city is strategically-calculated event planning, with ideal connections being made across the entire chain, from infrastructure sites to be eventually revitalized or newly built to the traditional or innovative stories. Those narratives where the soul of the city might be embodied, communicated and ultimately consistently expanded. As an outcome, visitors and citizens will


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find their shared, ultimate point of reference in such stories, in continuity and coherence.

Scenario 12 – De-mineralized City

Stone, glass, concrete; historically the landscape of our cities is ‘mineral’, and as such, ‘hard’ from a sensorial perspective as well as ‘hot’ in climate change man-agement terms. Contemporary cities are looking for alternatives to this convention. The city of the near future will explore how its natural patterns of air, water, steam, fog, snow can be recovered, revaluated, and reframed as focus for urban design in an attempt to create a softer, slower, self-maintained city. Instead of a ‘green belt’ at the edges nature is woven into the core of the city landscape with parks, guerrilla gardening, and other forms of vegetation throughout the metropolitan area.

Scenario 13 – Playful City

We expect the pulse of nightlife to increasingly matter in European cities in the context of place branding and as a means to attract destination tourism and young professional talent with mid- to high-incomes. Within the arena of fine arts, performing arts, youth concerts, and adult entertainment is where the ‘cultural R&D’ of European society takes place. It appears essential to preserve and encourage a diverse mix of lifestyle orientations within a city’s nightlife centers as a means of perpetuating the cultural development.

Scenario 14 – Hybrid-system City

To design and govern the new IoT integrated city infrastructure urban regimes representing stable and focused collaborative chains of lobbyists, experts and citizens will be required. It will become crucial to plan and execute massive top-down strategies at macro level while also deploying smaller projects in communities or experiments at micro scale which will help to maintain co-creative dialog in infrastructure design processes. The impact of resulting changes on our everyday urban life will be tangible as we shift in the next decade to an integration of urban design with interior design, connecting the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of buildings and the regeneration of our physical landscapes through the redefinition of our digital infrastructure. Within this scenario ‘Datascapes’ drive the architectural process, with strategies for planning and architecture being designed on the basis of statistical modeling.

Scenario 15 – Themed City

How does a ‘spatial design theme’ create the recog-nizable, memorable, intuitive feeling of urban consis-tency that represent a city’s particular ‘style’? Humans

instinctively think in terms of frames and schemata. The collective socio-economic and cultural dimensions of our life impart meaning to them, providing signals to us for what, for example, may be considered safe or dangerous. These expectations of style in the context of urban design and our perceptions related to them indicate the necessary consideration of them to city planners. New architecture relevant for the ‘Themed City’ will revolve around more compactness, higher versatility and perceived integration. With ‘walking distance’ as the reference standard for all purposes of micro-mobility.

Scenario 16 – Agricultural City

The ‘Agricultural City’ rethinks urban economy as a ‘slow city’ with a carbon neutral, virtuous cycle of consumption, including the ecologically-biased re-use of space and refocusing of processes of pro-duction. As opposed to the strict separations in the Modernist planning philosophy between dwelling and manufacturing or production and consumption, within this concept, pre- and post- modernist his-tory is revisited. A return to agricultural thinking will begin by looking for the space to innovate again. This ideal vision, perhaps Utopian, represents the deep rethinking of the metropolitan area infrastructure as the living backbone of an interdependent organism at the regional and provincial level. With its connec-tions to the surrounding countryside and its natural and managed resources. Through innovative mixes of regional and national policy-making and a ‘cradle-to-cradle’ overview based on an historically rooted, yet innovative ‘rural model of thinking,’ sustainable design can position the city as an integrated place in a larger geography, both ecologically and economically.


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Research methodology• First hypothesis built on desk research by analy-

sis of qualified sources and earlier data sets

• Validation performed by means of a panel of thought leaders and industry experts

• 23 one-to-one interviews to generate the nec-essary methodology “critical mass” for data validity. Theoretical reference: Grounded Theory

• Majority of interviews with European respon-dents, directly validating the early findings

• Minority of interviews with non-European re-spondents, indirectly validating the early find-ings and augmenting them globally

• Mix of “big cities” and smaller cities (outside Europe: big cities), with no geographic bias

• Majority of interview directly related to busi-ness (corporate, creative industries, architects)

• Minority of interviews related to academics or cultural sector (business schools, sociologists, fine arts curators)

• All sectors or companies or individual respon-dents related to one of the topics: urban futures, lifestyle, premium/luxury consumption, design.

Format:

• 5 semi-structured questions + introduction / open conclusions (7 questions)

• Unified questionnaire, individually customized execution

• From 20-25 to 45-60 minutes per interview


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