The Audi Urban Future Summit, held at The Squaire in Frankfurt, brought renowned researchers and experts together, and one thing emerged with great clarity: There is no such thing as the megacity. A city like New York will develop in a completely different way from Frankfurt am Main, Mumbai or Mexico City in terms of its structure and mobility. Before solutions are possible, the city in question therefore has to be examined closely in order to start by defining the right questions. The answers then relate to local needs – and at the same time have the potential to produce solutions with global reach.

The key sentence of the economist and sociologist Saskia Sassen from Columbia University New York was a constant motif throughout the Summit: “The city talks back.“ On various levels urbanity conveys information to us that has to be analyzed in order to evolve approaches to solving problems. This proposition was supported in the speech by Carlo Ratti, engineer, architect and Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In order to understand cities and their requirements in the future, the data that they make available to us must be evaluated in their entirety. Networks and databases play an important role in this, as do social cooperation and the subject of sharing. In future the car will be embedded in urban systems, in infrastructures, streams of digital data and social cooperation.