Future City and The Market Left Behind
City is a fundamental unit to a nation and its connectivity across cities and countries shapes the future of international development. Future City Summitis an initiative founded in Valentine’s Day in 2016 with a group of young alumni of The University of Hong Kong, visioning an avenue where bright young minds come together for betterment of their cities in multiple ways, entrepreneurship, entertainment, architecture, urban planning and so on.
City innovation for future In 2 years of development, Future City Summit and its fellows from Philippines, Bangladesh and Cambodia spot the niche of market. Public Private Partnership(PPP) project market is usually left behind with the few dominating players in the region such as United Nations, Asian Development Bank and World Bank focuses massively on:
- Large scale government project for youth (> 10 million USD)
- Strong leadership of seniors with bureaucracy
- Lack of active participation of regional hubs such as Hong Kong
Hong Kong itself is a global financial city where talents are capable of multiple professions from project implementation, management consultancy, global financing strategy and cultural intelligence management.
A mixed background of Hong Kong tapping a wide spectrum of agendas from Belt and Road initiative of China, Greater Bay Area(Hong Kong, Macau and 9 cities in Guangdong province), United Nations SDGs and other regional agendas such as ASEAN + 6(RCEP), and other national development such as Made In India and Vision 2021 of Bangladesh…all these allow Hong Kong to grab unique geopolitical opportunities to ride on a new wave of economic growth, starting from highly mobile WORKING YOUTH with entrepreneurialism and professionalism.
Here it would be important to stress “working youth” as this is the group that brings in innovation with certain working experience in society, and flexibility of learning, adopting and improvising.
Future City Summit(FCS), with all these backgrounds and market niche, efforts to tap to the market of small-medium size public private partnership projects with high leadership of youth on project implementation, with:
- Annual conference in August as global PPP project and talent sources
- Speakers and advisors as global financing strategy focus vetting group
With 2 years of convention, FCS has been recommended to certain PPP projects such as an affordable housing project in Indonesia named 1001 Teras, lined up by an alumni of FCS in 2016, an owner of a property company in Jakarta, aiming at re-structuring of global financing strategy so as to raise more investment for providing affordable housing. The project would be considered as a trial for market and model validation.
Such global financing advisory and impact assessment with project implementation brings together talents from corporate, academia, government and public sectors to join hands and travel to various cities in the region as a kind of soft power export of Hong Kong, as well as external relations of Hong Kong(~ “network diplomacy”), echoing the interest of Hong Kong government as well as China central government.
With a debate of Hong Kong losing its shine with relatively stagnant growth in innovation, governance and a need of way out for corporate in the market, Hong Kong may step up its game by enlarging its global financing role to more emerging markets’ PPP projects, WITH more young entrepreneurship and leadership, and right targeting in small-medium size investment.
Reach us for more: community@futurecitysummit.org
