News

At the Asia Pacific Cities Summit and Mayors’ Forum 2025

Dubai Municipality Launches “The Proactive Municipality Report”: Shaping the Future through Emerging Signals to Build Future-Ready Cities

• The Proactive Municipality Report outlines a foresight-driven model for building resilient, sustainable, and citizen-centred cities

• The Report sets out a framework for municipalities to turn small pilots into large-scale improvements that enhance daily life, resilience, and trust.
• The initiative highlights Dubai’s global leadership in foresight, sustainability, and urban innovation.

Dubai Municipality today launched The Proactive Municipality Report: Shaping the Future through Emerging Signals.The launch took place during the Asia Pacific Cities Summit and Mayors’ Forum (APCS) 2025, hosted at Expo Dubai from 27–29 October.

The launch of this report underscores Dubai Municipality’s institutional strength and its advanced strategic foresight capabilities, which are now deeply embedded within its operational framework to proactively shape the future. This commitment is demonstrated through an integrated foresight ecosystem comprising an ambitious long-term plan, an early warning system for emerging signals, and advanced data-driven analytical tools.

Developed under the Municipality’s strategic foresight programme, The Proactive Municipality: Shaping the Future through Foresight-Driven Signals introduces a signal-based model that enables city leaders to anticipate emerging challenges, identify opportunities from weak signals, and scale citizen-centric pilots into transformative, city-wide initiatives. Grounded in Dubai’s on-the-ground experience and informed by international best practices, the report provides a practical roadmap for embedding foresight into urban planning and municipal service delivery. It reflects Dubai’s ability not only to adopt global benchmarks but to extend beyond them — setting a precedent for future-oriented governance and positioning the city as a model for sustainable, agile, and resilient urban development.

His Excellency Eng. Marwan Ahmed Bin Ghalita, Director General of Dubai Municipality, said: “This report reflects the vision of our wise leadership to safeguard quality of life today and bring the standards of tomorrow into people’s reality. It provides practical tools for municipalities to anticipate change, integrate technology and sustainability, and place human well-being at the centre of decision-making.

He added: “Our goal is to present this report as a global reference for policymakers, urban planners, and municipal experts seeking to build resilient, sustainable, and human-centered cities, sharing Dubai’s experience and its influence in setting future benchmarks for city design. Through collaboration and foresight, Dubai continues to demonstrate its leadership as a model city that learns in public and delivers trust through steady, visible progress.”

Key insights from the Report

The report highlights three domains where proactive municipal foresight can deliver transformative outcomes:

Urban planning

The report emphasises new approaches to city design, such as codifying underground zoning to optimise space, employing civic-grade digital twins in approvals to simulate planning outcomes before implementation, and applying bio-mimicry systems at the building-code scale to reduce environmental impact.

Sustainable municipal networks

It introduces pioneering ideas such as AI-orchestrated resilience corridors to safeguard critical infrastructure, quantum-enabled energy-to-cooling grids to maximise efficiency, and circular construction frameworks supported by materials passport systems to ensure resources are reused rather than wasted.

Health and wellness

The report presents future-ready solutions including bio-digital city health systems that monitor urban health indicators in real time, AI-synchronised preventive safety networks, and climate-adaptive food production loops designed to boost resilience against supply shocks.

From vision to action

The report also outlines a “Vision to Implementation”, calling on municipalities worldwide to institutionalise foresight as a daily practice. It encourages city leaders to test ideas in public, transform lessons learned into regulatory frameworks, and scale proven solutions to benefit entire communities.

Dubai’s global role

By launching the report at APCS 2025 — its first edition in the MEASA region — Dubai Municipality underscores its role as an official partner to the Mayors’ Forum and reaffirms its commitment to sharing replicable, future-ready models with city leaders across Asia Pacific and beyond.