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Keeping the resolution to be healthier, fitter, and more environmentally conscious is made easy in Supriya Prakash Sen’s vision for cities of the future. Strap up your boots and take a leap of faith towards a brighter future.

Walkability can be a financially savvy strategy! Research has shown that designing a city for Walkability yields benefits in terms of the environment, social cohesiveness, health benefits for an ageing society- but what is new is that it can also be an economically astute strategy. Knowledge workers want to live, work and play downtown, where they can raise families in healthy environments and maximize their creativity. Financing tools like value capture finance and yield cos can help engineer this change by providing a structure that will draw investors, corporations and private partners into the project in a cohesive way. This week, in Hong Kong’s Walk 21 conference, I had opportunity to describe some tools and frameworks that can be useful for doing this. But as I emphasized – there’s more to it than this.

While innovative financial tools and public private partnerships are important to make sure that the right infrastructure is implemented, social change needs more than a set of financial tools and techniques bolted on to a fundamentally warped way of thinking that doesn’t fit the new reality. In other words, engendering large-scale behavior change in our societies will also need a bottom-up, paradigm shift in mindsets. It’s such a waste of potential if the cities of developing Asia continue to be strangled by the self-serving, bureaucracy-led, corruption-ridden real estate development methods which have brought them to their present sad state of affairs.

Key points include:

• Zero-carbon cities
• Efficient, equitable and enduring cities of tomorrow
• Hong Kong Walk 21

Read the full article, Walkability as the new source of competitive advantage for cities, on LinkedIn.