Future tech will give you the benefits of city life anywhere

While it's a generally held view in real estate circles that millennials are being drawn toward urban cores to work and live, leaving the suburbs to stagnate, the reality appears more complex.

Recent patterns of millennial migration suggest just the opposite, says recent research by commercial real estate company CBRE Group (CBG). Looking at the most recent U.S. Census data, CBRE's analysis says about 30 percent of millennials — in this case defined "roughly" as born between 1980 and 1995 — reside in cities. But, it adds, "the other 70 percent do not appear to be rushing to move downtown."

Among the midrange set of millennials age 25 to 29, for example, 426,000 went from suburbs to cities in 2014 while 529,000 did the opposite. And for those age 20 to 24, CBRE said, the suburban migration "was even more pronounced" — though it acknowledged that "some were returning to childhood rooms or basements in their parents' homes."

It found even more evidence for urban outflow among older millennials and the youngest members of Generation X — those 30 to 44: 1.2 million of them left cities for suburbs while 540,000 headed in the opposite direction.

The world crossed an important milestone in 2008. For the first time in history, more than half of Earth's population lived in cities. And now, if current population trends continue, more than 70 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2050.

Now, before we start assuming that that last bubble graph is an inescapable reality, remember this: Economic trends do not continue indefinitely. There are positives and negatives of living in cities. And there's no guarantee that the positive economic trends will always trump the negative ones.

The world’s population is becoming increasingly urban. Sometime in 2007 is usually reckoned to be the turning point when city dwellers formed the majority of the global population for the first time in history. Today, the trend toward urbanization continues: as of 2014, it’s thought that 54 percent of the world’s population lives in cities – and it’s expected to reach 66 percent by 2050. Migration forms a significant, and often controversial, part of this urban population growth.

In some places, particularly in poorer countries, migration is the main driver of urbanization. In 2009, UN-Habitat estimated that 3m people were moving to cities every week. In global gateway cities such as Sydney, London, and New York, migrants make up over a third of the population. The proportion in Brussels and Dubai is even greater, with migrants accounting for more than half of the population.

Official figures show that the rural population will increase by 6 percent over the next decade as people choose to leave cities and settle in the countryside. The population of the English countryside will increase by more than half-a-million in the next decade as more people choose to leave cities and settle in rural areas, official figures have found. According to the ONS, the rural population will increase by 6 per cent by 2025, leading to a major boom in England’s countryside economy.

The report added: “Continuation of such trends could be expected to lead to stronger productivity growth, job creation and higher output in rural areas. Over the next decade, productivity in rural areas could grow faster than in urban areas.”

Since the industrial revolution, humanity has flocked to the cities, where jobs are plentiful and centralized services make inhabitants' lives easier. However, technology is gradually beginning to reverse this trend. People who have always dreamed of escaping the city for the country life, but who have been held back by a lack of employment opportunities in rural areas, are starting to find that the transition is possible due to recent advances in technology.

Recently, in developed countries, sociologists have observed suburbanization and counter-urbanization, or movement away from cities, which may be driven by transportation infrastructure or social factors like racism. In developing countries, urbanization is characterized by large-scale movements of people from the countryside into cities. In developed countries, people are able to move out of cities while maintaining many of the advantages of city life because of improved communications and means of transportation. In fact, counter-urbanization appears most common among the middle and upper classes who can afford to buy their own homes.

Urban areas around the world are facing greater challenges than they did 20 years ago when Habitat II Conference took place. The persistent urban issues include the growing number of urban residents living in informal settlements and the challenge of providing urban services. The emerging urban issues include climate change; exclusion and rising inequality; rising insecurity; and an upsurge in international migration. Between 1950 and 2005, the level of urbanization increased from 29 percent to 49 percent, while global carbon emissions from fossil-fuel burning increased by almost 500 percent. This growth is obviously unsustainable.

Cities account for between 60 and 80 percent of energy consumption and generate as much as 70 percent of the human-induced greenhouse gas emissions primarily through the consumption of fossil fuels for energy supply and transportation. Urbanization offers many opportunities to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies to deal with climate change especially through urban planning and design. At the same time, the upsurge in forced migration across international borders is an emerging issue which has implications for cities. The war in Syria has given rise to the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. In 2015, more than 1.5 million forced migrants and refugees arrived in Europe compared to 280,000 in 2014.

These days, 51 percent of Americans prefer to shop online rather than in stores — a figure that jumps to 67 percent for Millennials and 56 percent of Gen Xers. According to some experts, online sales will increase from $335 billion in 2015 to $523 billion in 2020, a rise of 9.32 percent per year, although the current annual growth rate is actually 14 percent.

As these figures suggest, retailers need to fully embrace digital commerce in order to thrive; stores without an online presence are destined to disappear. Today’s consumer owns several devices — smartphone, tablet, computer — and expects an online shopping experience that’s quick, easy, and, above all, user-friendly.

For the first time ever, shoppers are going to the web for most of their purchases. An annual survey by analytics firm comScore (scor, +0.24 percent) and UPS (ups, +1.59 percent) found that consumers are now buying more things online than in stores.

Around 40 percent of the world population has an internet connection today (view all on a page). In 1995, it was less than 1 percent. The number of internet users has increased tenfold from 1999 to 2013. The first billion was reached in 2005. The second billion in 2010. The third billion in 2014.

Story highlights:

Average worker telecommutes two days per month

46 percent of telecommuters do so during the workday

Most say telecommuters just as productive as other employees

When we asked respondents about their roundtrip commute times, we received some surprising news. For those who are classified as non-teleworkers or those who do not telecommute at all in their role, we saw i that the majority of these workers were experiencing roundtrips between 30 and 60 minutes or more on a daily basis. In the Asia Pacific region, 34 percent of non-teleworkers had daily commutes of over an hour.

Those who were classified as teleworkers actually had longer commutes, which begs the chicken-or-egg question. Do people telecommute because they live far from an office or do people move far from an office because they can telecommute? Thirty-two percent of APAC teleworkers reported commutes of over an hour, with 28 percent of North American and 23 percent of the Europe Middle East (EMEA) region teleworkers experiencing the same.

People living in rural areas are happier than those in cities because they enjoy a greater sense of community and easy access to the countryside, the Office for National Statistics has suggested.

How can drones revolutionize healthcare in rural Rwanda and potentially beyond? Partnering across disciplines, UPS has helped create the world’s first drone-based medical delivery system, transporting emergency medical supplies to remote villages in Rwanda. On track to hopefully save thousands of lives a year, this scalable system could conceivably help transform how we deliver medical resources in the future as populations outgrow aging infrastructure.

UPS announced it has successfully tested a drone that launches from the top of a delivery truck. The test was conducted in collaboration with drone-maker Workhorse. Sending drones to make deliveries from package cars could bolster efficiency in our network by reducing miles driven.

"The biggest barrier to improving rural logistics is the last mile problem because many delivery companies do not reach remote rural regions due to cost concerns," said a PR representative with JD.com Inc, China's second-largest online retailer.

Unlike China's cities, whose dense population makes delivering packages far more cost-effective, delivery companies have to spend a lot more time and effort to serve rural areas, the PR representative told the Global Times on Sunday.

The State Post Bureau, which oversees the express delivery industry, has pledged to increase the coverage area to 80 percent of domestic towns and villages by the end of 2016, according to a statement on its website.

Since Amazon’s surprise in late 2013 with their delivery drone, last-mile delivery for parcels have been a hot topic, especially in the last 12 months. The cost of those deliveries is estimated at $75 billion, and 40 percent of that is in China, Germany, and the United States. This market is also growing, at a yearly rate between 7 to 10 percent in mature markets, and up to 300 percent in developing markets like India. With these numbers in mind, no wonder that various organizations, established companies, and start-ups, see a great potential in last-mile delivery.

Consumer preferences are pushing for new offerings in last mile delivery. According to a survey conducted by McKinsey&Company, almost 25 percent of respondents are ready to pay premiums for same-day of even shorter delivery. The remaining respondents prefer the cheapest option.

With this in mind, below is a non-exhaustive timeline of various last-mile delivery initiatives that show the impact of drones with last mile delivery.

And now, what can we expect within the next 10 years? According to the McKinsey&Company study, autonomous vehicles will deliver 80 percent of parcels by 2025. Depending on the inhabitants’ density, aerial drones, wheeled drones, or autonomous vehicles with lockers will establish themselves as the dominant delivery modes. These will replace or improve current last mile delivery methods such as lockers, bike couriers, and human driving delivery trucks.