Keynote: The Social Business City

This post is part of our Seizing the Urban Moment discussion series, following the fourth edition of the New Cities Summit in Jakarta in June 2015.

Should we have cities at all? Cities come from a previous kind of thinking.

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Founder, Grameen Bank

Professor Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with Grameen Bank, the microfinancing pioneer that he started in the 1970s.

However, his talk at the New Cities Summit did not focus on those initiatives. “I’m always known as the Grameen guy…Grameen means rural, and here I show up in a cities conference”, he joked.

The Nobel Laureate wanted to set out three messages for city leaders.

First, Yunus spoke about the need for cities to completely reinvent themselves and reconsider their operating models. “When we talk about cities, those are the ugly spots because that’s where all the rich people live and all the poorest people live,” he said.

“Should we have cities at all? Cities come from a previous kind of thinking: you don’t have infrastructure everywhere, so you put it all in one place,” he added. “The contribution of cities making the world unlivable is enormous. That concept of cities cannot go further – we have to redesign”.

Professor Yunus was clear: cities cannot be celebrated if they enable massive inequality, and hoover up vast amounts of resources for the benefit of a very few. With massively increasing populations, there is a risk of growing challenges and resource consumption, without the promised benefits of urbanization.

Second, Yunus called for more “social business” approaches to tackling these great challenges. Cities and citizens should run operations as though they are a business, but not seek to make a profit out of them. Instead, funds should be reinvested into the operation to continue to tackle a problem on a bigger scale. “Create a business, so the social business money goes out, does the work, and comes back. Then you can use the money again and again. Charity [money] has one life, but social business money has an endless life.”

Third, Yunus called for a new approach to unemployment. Everyone should be encouraged to start their own businesses, he said, rather than applying for jobs with big employers. Cities should prioritize infrastructure that helps people start companies, he said – even if those companies will only ever break even.

“We can create a completely new framework in order to create a completely new civilization. It needs to be completely redesigned,” he boldly concluded.

Speaker

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Founder, Grameen Bank