Saving City Lives & Livelihoods

A city simulation platform for testing and monitoring pandemic Response and Recovery actions, with integrated measurement of health, social, economic, and public fiscal consequences.

This platform will reliably simulate short-term pandemic/response dynamics coupled with longer-term socioeconomic recovery dynamics, as a city-tailored test-bed for saving both lives and livelihoods.

Craig Stephens, co-founder and Managing Director of 4Sight Solutions LLC

Cities are primary generators of socioeconomic growth on which billions of people depend; they’re also growth centers for pandemics which do huge socioeconomic damage. Pandemic growth and containment both depend on social and economic behaviors; and these same behaviors also drive job creation, personal and business incomes, economic growth, and public cash flows.

Leaders therefore face a pandemic conundrum: how to maximally protect lives against the health threat while minimizing resulting life and economic impacts from lost livelihoods?

Traditional models and analyses provide almost no guidance for pandemic Response and Recovery decisions and policies because:

1)   Standard epidemiological models cannot (by their nature) incorporate the social and economic behaviors that drive pandemic growth and containment;

2)   Traditional economic models aren’t applicable to cities and don’t measure social, economic, and public fiscal damage from pandemics or containment measures.

No platform currently exists for integrated analysis of pandemic Response and Recovery options and their combined health/social/economic/public-fiscal impacts. This leaves leaders flying mostly blind and causes pandemic-policy mistakes that exact a high toll on both lives and livelihoods.

In approximate order from most to least local, our solution facilitates effective collaboration on pandemic solutions in cities among these participants and stakeholders, and resulting benefits to them all.

1) City dwellers, including different social groups

2) Urban businesses, their employees and customers

3) City leaders, managers, and departments

4) Departments of health at all levels of government

5) Financial departments and treasuries at all levels of government

6) Other cities

Our solution satisfies their common and critically unmet need for visibility into the joined-up dynamics of pandemic and whole-city systems, and for reliable "What if..?" analysis of pandemic Response and Recovery options.

We understand this need because part of our team has been doing cutting-edge work on the dynamics of cities since 2015, particularly in Greater London. Another part of our team has been doing equally ground-breaking work on pandemic dynamics since the COVID pandemic began. Other parts of the team have global reach and deep experience with cities and the full range of their issues.

Our standard practice is to engage with cities and health departments as full partners and co-developers.

Our solution provides a public "super-good" by reliably simulating trajectories for a host of cross-influencing and systemically driven public goods under a wide range of pandemic, Response, and Recovery scenarios. A few examples of simulated public goods and the larger "super-good"...

1) Changing housing availability and population mix by income group

2) Differentiated pandemic health impacts by income group and geography

3) Public transport options under pandemic conditions and resulting health, employment, income, and public cash-flow impacts

4) Emergency room and other pandemic treatment capacity, impacts from exceeding capacities, and options for avoiding overloads

5) Reliably anticipated whole-system impacts from and consequences of Response and Recovery options, yielding resulting narratives that are readily understandable, defensible, and more persuasive than typical sound-bite justifications

6) Reliably identifying complementary suites of Response/Recovery options that will produce lives-and-livelihoods outcomes far better than the sum of their separately measured impacts would suggest (these high-leverage option combinations are typical of complex dynamic systems, and impossible to reliably identify, understand, and justify without whole-system simulation)

Reliable whole-system city/pandemic simulation capability is a breakthrough public good in itself, one that can be made citizen-accessible.

Based on extensive experience, our solution can be expected to have the same sort of impact on cities in pandemic as it has in numerous other applications of dynamic simulation technology over the past 60 years.

1) Rapidly expanding understanding of integrated pandemic-in-city dynamics and resulting health/social/economic/public-fiscal impacts;

2) Rapid testing of multi-dimensional Response/Recovery options under local conditions, individually and in combinations, measuring resulting impacts on lives and livelihoods;

3) Testing and refinement of the best Response/Recovery options and option combinations to further enhance beneficial impacts and avoid/minimize/mitigate negative impacts;

4) Rapid testing of alternative implementation plans for pandemic Response/Recovery options (in dynamic social systems, the best options can be defeated by an implementation plan that conflicts dynamically with these options, which can only be discovered by simulation testing).

5) Simulation-based monitoring of implementation and emerging outcomes against those expected, to diagnose surprises and test mid-course adjustments.

A good city/pandemic simulator is the fastest and most reliable and potent means of devising city-wide pandemic solutions, and far superior to city capabilities today. For leaders and departments, these whole-system analyses will enable shared views and coordinated actions that lead to demonstrably superior lives-and-livelihoods outcomes.

Our first-year goal is the London Pilot, delivering/proving the first city/pandemic simulation platform. With our team in place and the technology ready, Pilot funding is the remaining need (the pandemic having wreaked havoc on resources of the Greater London Authority).

The team objective for years 2-3 is beginning rapid scale-up and roll-out of tailored city/pandemic simulation platforms in cities around the world. This requires two things:

1) A global technology delivery/service organization; this is why Capgemini Invent (the strategic arm of Capgemini) is on our team;

2) Financing for delivering and providing ongoing support for these city/pandemic simulators, so that pandemic-impoverished cities can receive and use them as quickly as possible.

These city/pandemic platforms will quantify the full range of interconnected health/social/economic impacts from the pandemic and from effective Response/Recovery options...and how these impacts will be naturally monetized in public cash flows to city and higher-level governments.

Our simulation work with the Greater London Authority on infrastructure and other public investments makes it clear that public cash-flow gains from superior pandemic Response/Recovery strategies will dwarf the cost of the simulation platform in each city. This is a solid basis for financing via impact bonds.

Our simulation platforms are impact-measurement machines; they monitor and evaluate systemic impacts with rigorous, integrated metrics on numerous fronts. The most important impacts are those that matter most to actors and stakeholders in the system being simulated. Our city and pandemic simulators already measure such impacts and guide as to how beneficial impacts may best be assured and negative impacts minimized or mitigated.

As an example, the London Simulation Platform has far exceeded expectations for a crucial impact target: quantifying the full social/environmental/economic impacts of various public investments and policies as these impacts are monetized in public cash flows.

Results surpassed even our our expectations. Simulation analyses demonstrated what some in the Greater London Authority had long believed but could not prove by any form of traditional analysis: that many public investments will amply fund themselves and more from resulting increases in social and economic growth and consequential gains in Central Government cash flows. These analyses also demonstrated that the high value of effective public investments is a by-product of chronic starvation of new public investment resulting from perceived funding scarcity. In other words, the chronic shortage of public investment is self-inflicted damage.

Our $15m of investment to date has overcome what were major technology and cost barriers. We created the innovative technology needed and have the team to continue developing it. This technology makes our simulation products scalable and cost-effective, usable by large technology/service firms on behalf of their clients, and usable by and affordable for these clients under license. Capgemini Invent has the client relationships and the human resources for rapid scale-up around the world.

The main barrier remaining is financing for the London city/pandemic Pilot project. Still operating under pandemic conditions, and facing huge deficits, the Greater London Authority and Mayor of London will happily continue collaborating as our living technology development/testing laboratory. They simply lack the means of paying for the Pilot.

The London Pilot will merge the city and pandemic simulation technology and prove resulting capabilities and value. With a successful Pilot and London-branded testimonials, financing for subsequent scale-up is expected to be straightforward based on current conversations with investment banks, private equity, and secured tokenization platforms.

Funding for the Pilot constitutes the remaining barrier.

The city/pandemic Pilot team

   4Sight Solutions LLC

   The Greater London Authority and Mayor of London

   Capgemini Invent

   Center for Policy Exploration Analysis and Simulation (PEAS)

Others

   General Dynamics Bath Iron Works  

Very specifically, the Trinity Challenge can help overcome our immediate and most significant barrier, namely, London's lack of funding for the Pilot. Having learned of the Trinity Challenge just a few days ago, we immediately focused on it as a possible way to overcome this barrier.

We would be most interested in partnering with Sloan School professors Hazhir Rhamandad and John Sterman, based on their multi-national COVID simulation analyses. Having worked extensively with Professor Sterman in the past, we have great respect for their dynamic simulation work in the pandemic field.