Urban citizens in Vietnam and many countries around the world may never forget the home time social distancing due to the pandemic over past two years. However, a long stay at home may help us to think deeper to cope with uncertain future.

Future cities are becoming less predictable than ever. The exponential paces of changes due to natural and man-made crises as well as progresses in human knowledge, technology, and breaking through innovations make our future more uncertain. We could hardly imagine how we survive without internet and mobile phones, both just appeared three decades ago. Few could believe traffic jams in Ho Chi Minh City disappeared this summer 2021; and no one likes to see our children having no access to playgrounds due to either prolonged pandemic or the intrusion of car parks after decades of car booming.

However, this pandemic showed how to cope with chaotic by strategic actions at systems level. Disruption from the food-chain in Ho Chi Minh City or Da Nang recently revealed that we should care not only specific logistic business, but the whole logistic eco-system, including labor supply or labelling products. Growing with scale and connectivity in urban economy nowadays multiplied our power and strength, but it requires us to solve city affairs at systems level, where things connected to (perhaps) everything else. Our future cities, therefore, should be learnt and prepared to connect better with nature and with ourselves as eco-systems, using systems approach, and our strategic perseverance.

With the diverse issues of future cities, we would like to call for joining our international conference on ‘Future cities – from chaotic to strategic in connected systems’ this December 2021. We would discuss to address some strategic questions of future cities such as space & building (How we choose and prepare our habitation over space with changing technologies, capacity, and demand?), mobility & logistics (How to commute and reach/deliver to destinations with more connected and alternative means?), environment & infrastructure (How to be served and live in the changing built environment where infrastructure are improved with technologies and climate change), and economy & society (how to support urban ecosystems with the rise of new business models and eco-systems, threats of pandemic and aging and demographic changing societies).

This is the 7th consecutive time Sustainable Urban Development Study Program, Vietnamese-German University hold Annual International Conference. This year is special when we co-organize with the team in the Technical University of Darmstadt (include the city of Darmstadt, Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden) Germany, together with the support of Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Binh Duong Department of Science and Technology.

On behalf of organizers