DUBAI, 2 October 2025 – New research from Expo City Dubai reveals the dilemma facing city leaders: the immediate need to deliver essential services while investing in long-term resilience to cope with rapid urbanisation.

The 2025 Urban Readiness Report, developed in partnership with YouGov and surveying more than 1,000 city leaders around the world, shows that although leaders recognise both imperatives, the majority (75 per cent) are constrained by limited funding and governance gaps.

The findings will inform the agenda at the 2025 Asia Pacific Cities Summit (2025APCS) & Mayors’ Forum on 27-29 October, a global cities summit convened by Expo City Dubai under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence of the UAE, and Chairman of The Executive Council of Dubai.

Nadia Verjee, Executive Director, Global Initiatives and Advisory at Expo City Dubai, said: “As cities absorb burgeoning populations, they are increasingly vulnerable to social and climate-related pressures, from inadequate infrastructure to public health crises. At the same time, city leaders are grappling with limited funding for competing priorities, making it harder to deliver essential services while investing in the necessary solutions to cope with environmental and economic shocks.

“These insights are the driving force behind 2025APCS, which is designed to bring city leaders together to exchange ideas, develop new models and collaborate on solutions that will address the myriad of challenges confronting cities.”

Environmental resilience and urban regeneration

The report reveals an apparent tension between climate resilience and the delivery of essential services. Environmental stressors such as urban heat, flooding and wildfires emerge as a leading area requiring urgent intervention over the next five years. Yet this sits alongside challenges relating to core services that directly affect citizens’ daily lives: urban mobility, healthcare systems, affordable housing and the infrastructure needed to support rapid urbanisation.

At the same time, 75 per cent of city leaders face a lack of funding that hinders progress towards long-term resilience. As a result, many remain focused on delivering the basic services and utilities that residents rely on. To cope with the scale of the challenge, city leaders say public-private partnerships will accelerate infrastructure development and service delivery, particularly in healthcare.

City leadership and economic development

City leaders identify economic inequality as the most significant barrier to building a more socially cohesive society. This helps explain why one in three leaders recognise expanding economic opportunities and entrepreneurship as a top priority to create a future-ready urban environment for the next generation.

In the context of numerous competing priorities, clear communication becomes a vital tool of governance. While 59 per cent of leaders say their cities communicate effectively, nearly one in six indicate their cities leave decisions unexplained or fail to communicate them at all. This represents a governance risk. When cities fail to engage the public in their policies, trust and social cohesion erode, undermining the foundations of urban resilience.

Quality of life

Human-centric design is gaining traction, with 71 per cent of leaders prioritising wellbeing, safety and inclusion. However, fewer than one third of city leaders are embedding people-first policies across all planning decisions, highlighting how human-centred design principles are being applied on a project-by-project basis rather than fully integrated across planning processes.

Digital transformation

When benchmarking current levels of digital transformation, the report reveals a digital disparity. While a handful of cities have reached the ‘cognitive’ stage, with predictive systems and AI-led services, the majority are not accelerating fast enough towards connected systems and using real-time data.

In the high-income economies of Germany, the UK and the US, only one per cent of city leaders believe their digital transformation has progressed to this ‘cognitive’ stage. Those economies cited fragmented coordination across departments and limited funding as the top two barriers prohibiting innovation and digital transformation.

Conversely, 47 per cent of cities in India are using predictive systems (such as advanced data analytics) and digital twinning to simulate how new buildings, roads or transit systems will impact congestion, pollution or energy use.

Across many emerging markets, including the UAE, KSA, Malaysia and the Philippines, one in two leaders describe their cities as progressing from ‘smart’ to ‘connected’, using integrated systems with IoT and real-time data with citizen participation platforms.

Expo City Dubai – located at the heart of Dubai’s growth corridor – is designed as a blueprint for sustainable urban development. Rooted in the belief that collaboration can propel sustainable progress, Expo City will leverage the survey findings to drive action at 2025APCS, building on its legacy as a convener and enabler as the home of Expo 2020 Dubai and COP28.