Readied Cities
Why readiness is key for understanding where location opportunity is forming next.
Words SIMON MADIGAN
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Ahead of the release of Berkof’s 2026 Readied Cities Index—our inaugural index of the locations where opportunity is forming next—this essay explores why readiness informs location opportunity, why it helps us discover the places building the future fastest, and why it reveals which locations are best prepared for the next twenty years.
In an increasingly complex world, the most valuable thing you can know about a location is no longer about what it is. Rather it is about what it is ready for. The geopolitical, climate, economic, demographic, and technological shocks that have and will continue to come about over the next century. From the current geopolitical shifts in the world order, to changing migration patterns and technologies, readiness does not only mean robustness, the capacity to withstand a shock. Berkof looks at readiness from categories above robustness. Principally, locations that embody readiness do not merely survive volatility, but emerge from geopolitical, economic, climate, and technological change stronger. Berkof was founded based on this mission. Through conversations with our clients, fruitful partnerships, and a relentless drive to articulate location opportunities to our audiences, Berkof has set about crafting a considered manifesto to help illustrate this mission. The aim of this essay is to introduce this manifesto, as a prelude for how we set about crafting Berkof’s upcoming ‘2026 Readied Cities Index’. What our discoveries show is definitive. A location’s readiness is the single most powerful indicator of location opportunity.
Why the emphasis on readiness?
Readiness informs whether a location succumbs to climate risk, adds CapEx surprises, or strands your asset. Readiness is also an indicator of a location trending upward but still underpriced by the market - readiness is upstream of location opportunity. We founded Berkof to explore how ‘readiness’, which can also be defined as preparation or adaptation, provides a more complete lens to help clients with their location decision making, in comparison with many location analytics companies that predominantly focus on location risk, or the asset itself, we help you understand the present while focusing on articulating where the opportunities will emerge in the future. Berkof tells you about the location the asset sits in and whether that location is rising or declining. From cities to real estate parcels, location readiness enables clients to decide everything from whether to commit capital to commercial real estate or from deciding how to design, specify, and deliver in architecture, engineering, and construction. Berkof applies artificial intelligence, machine learning, and expert context to large data sets, and proprietary data, to interpret and articulate location opportunity for your decision making requirements.
When thinking about readiness, Berkof likes to use the example of the United Arab Emirates, a location that has manufactured its investability for the present but which has also systemically been preparing itself for the future by building a structural buffer through long-term infrastructure development, sovereign wealth accumulation, and early energy transition policies. History is peppered with examples of countries, cities, and principalities, that have constructed their identity and future potential around the concept of ‘manufactured habitability’. This concept sits at the crux of how we define readiness. Location value is increasingly built, not inherited and readiness is this manufacturing process. Dubai and Abu Dhabi should both not by natural endowment be two of the world’s most increasingly important commercial centres. Parched deserts, limited fresh water, and excessive summer temperatures, yet both Emirates have carved out a geopolitical, cultural, economic, and technological position for themselves on the world stage. Backed by their lucrative resource reserves, both cities have diversified their structural fundamentals, by manufacturing their investability across livability, the economy, technology, and culture over the past few decades that has embodied a pragmatic approach to focused technocracy - with stability grounded in the UAE’s appeasement approach to regional geopolitics. The UAE’s expert leadership, digital governance, and economic diversification has enabled both Emirates to diversify themselves across all strands of their economy. Turning their parched deserts into dynamic and evolving cities both are rapidly leveraging their plentiful resources to attract people and capital, while developing computing infrastructure in advance of emerging technologies, and adapting their cities for increasingly excessive heat.
Soaring into the future - Dubai has manufactured its investability for the present while readying its economy for the future.
Dubai is recalibrating itself towards a renewables future.
By manufacturing their investability both Dubai and Abu Dhabi have developed for the present, but with an eye on the future. The Emirate’s have applied readiness over the past few decades, triggered mostly by their geographic and geopolitical position within the region. Readiness has been applied across their economies from resource management, to digital transformation and pragmatic governance to ensure that any shocks to their development trajectory are not only managed but are a catalyst for improvement and transformation. In late February 2026, this readiness was tested, with the escalation of tensions across the Gulf. Years of countries across the gulf readying themselves for another conflict in the region were materialising. For the United Arab Emirates, its sense of security, identity, and confidence have been altered undeniably, but importantly the UAE had been readying its economy for this type of shock for the past forty years.
The UAE has been diversifying away from its oil dependence for the past few decades. The country's early dominance in solar energy, primarily facilitated by the establishment of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company in 2006, and the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park has allowed the UAE to master ultra-low-cost solar generation long before war time supply disruptions have forced other nations to adapt. The UAE’s financial shielding via sovereign wealth was intentionally designed to fund state expenditures and defund the AED currency from any prolonged regional conflict. Similarly the country's National Food Security Strategy 2051, has mandated immense storage silos of grain and basic food reserves to cushion against domestic food shortages. Importantly, the country’s hardening of its physical energy infrastructure has been a critical lifeline to ensure that at least 60% of its crude oil exports can bypass the Strait of Hormuz - through the nearly two decade old Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline connection to the port of Fujairah.
The United Arab Emirates has shown how locations can develop their readiness to support their present ambitions, while simultaneously laying the foundations for a stronger future that can not only withstand shocks but benefit from it. While it is still early days in the UAE’s reconfiguration of its position in the GCC, the UAE’s foresightedness has created the conditions for change and transformation, which is now only being catalysed by the region's current geopolitical shock. The UAE is prioritising insulating its hydroeconomy, accelerating its renewable energy diversification, re-routing its supply chains, and recognising climate adaptation as a critical national security priority in pursuit of enabling its economy to strengthen and benefit in the medium to long term.
Berkof’s upcoming ‘2026 Readied Cities Index’ illustrates ten cities that are readying themselves for the future. These cities are imagining a better future and building their future’s faster than the present suggests. These are the locations where opportunity is forming. As Dubai and Abu Dhabi show, a location's long term success is based on its ability to manufacture its own readiness by building resilient foundations across its economy to adapt to change and emerge stronger from shocks.
Capturing Abu Dhabi's future - the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park.
An increasingly complex world
In this increasingly complex world, four forces are now shaping every location on earth at the same time. Climate, the energy transition, demographics, and compute readiness all inform whether a real estate parcel, municipality, city or region is an opportunity or a liability. The climate is changing the physical facts of a place. Heat, water, sea level rise, flooding, and storms are all critical factors for location decision making. The energy transition is rewiring the economic value of a location. Assets that are positioned in locations with a decarbonising grid are being rewarded. Those wired to the old one are undeniably stranding. Migration, aging, and affordability are redistributing people, while talent is now choosing where to live rather than where to work. While capital still follows people, the findings in the 2026 Readied Cities Index show an additional emerging indicator - people and compute. From hybrid people-agent workforces to the physical build-out of the artificial intelligence and quantum computing economy, emerging location indicators are converging around resources and highly skilled talent. This is creating a new form of location demand. Real estate, design and construction decisions are now based at the intersection of these themes. Berkof as a provider of location decision intelligence solutions applies the metric the market cannot see - readiness. We spotlight the emerging locations where these forces are creating opportunities for clients.
For Berkof, readiness is the metric the market cannot see. Readiness - the rate at which a place is becoming investable has fallen outside the bounds of price in real estate. This is because readiness is difficult to measure. For real estate, which is priced almost entirely on the past. Every number that is trusted is a record of the past - from yield, comparables, to occupancy. Measuring the past is understandable as it is easier to measure. For Berkof, measuring the past is no longer a conducive decision making method for understanding a location’s prospects. In an increasingly complex and unstable world the past is an unreliable instrument for understanding the future. To understand the importance of measuring the future trajectory of a location - metaphor is useful. For over two centuries a ship’s captain could fix his latitude from the sun. He was however unable to fix his longitude. This enabled him to know where he was but not where his present course would take him. The development of the chronometer revolutionised this by making longitude measurable. For Berkof, real estate has occupied the same condition. It has well defined instruments for measuring the past and for where it stands today. But interestingly it still has almost no instruments for measuring its longitude - for where its trajectory is taking it. For Berkof, readiness is the chronometer.
To understand, measure and apply readiness to location decision making, it is important to fully define readiness. Readiness is a property of becoming or a forward disposition. Our present heavily prioritises what Berkof calls ‘accumulative readiness’. Accumulative readiness asks; What have we stored against the future? This way of thinking defines readiness as a stock of things; provision, buy insurance, hedge, fortify or stockpile. This implies that an entity or organisation would buy insurance against a risk, and thus would become overly reliant on purchasing protection for the present, while becoming devoid in its ability to cultivate the institutional, and governance poise to handle unexpected future risks. ‘Dispositional readiness’ asks ‘How are we positioned to handle the future?’ This way of thinking redefines readiness as a stance towards time; a way of being poised, ready to act, put in place change mechanisms ahead of an unknown future and any unknown risks. Dispositional readiness is underpinned by two underlying principles. Firstly a cultivation of Productive Latency. This is the intentional practice of allowing our stance towards the future to be kept dormant and uncommitted so that it can be co-opted towards whatever future actually arrives. Secondly, Futural Imagination. The deepest principle of all readiness is imagination. The example cities in the index all embody what we’ve coined Futural Imagination. That is a location can only be ready for futures it can picture or imagine. While it is impossible for us to accurately predict the future - a city can imagine the future it wishes to create. Berkof’s approach to defining readiness as a precursor of location opportunity is inherently grounded in these cumulative principles.
‘Climate, the energy transition, demographics, and compute readiness all inform whether a real estate parcel, municipality, city or region is an opportunity or a liability’.
For Berkof’s clients this approach to location opportunity makes readiness visible. Readiness by its very nature is hard to see in advance. What cannot be read does not get priced. Similarly what does not get priced is where the institutional return resides and ultimately the opportunities. As readiness is not a present condition, it is a forward disposition, it is always readiness for something in some context. That is a place is ready or not for the particular forces and risks that may or may not bear down on it over a particular horizon. Berkof thinks of readiness along a slope rather than on the level. That is the rate a place is becoming investable and not the height it has already reached. This is why readiness is hard to see in advance because a disposition only reveals itself when the future event, risk or force it is indexed to actually arrives.
In an increasingly complex world, governed by the rule of entropy, response to disorder is a critical metric of location readiness. Fragility implies things that break under volatility. Robust things withstand volatility. Resilient things recover after stress. Resilience is the most common metric sold to institutional investors and commercial real estate clients. Insurance premiums, hazard screening, and the flood map all ask whether an asset survives. Berkof redefines this question. The more valuable question, on a twenty year horizon, is which locations are strengthened by the next two decades of disruption. In a non-stationary world, Berkof thinks about readiness not as a response to disturbance, but through an anticipatory alignment approach. That is the ability to sense what is emerging, pre-shape capabilities, and enter a future state that is strengthened by uncertainty.
Readiness sits upstream of fragility, robustness, and resilience. It is the standing disposition that selects which of these a location will exhibit when a shock arrives. The United Arab Emirates was not fragile, robust, or resilient. What the country exhibited was readiness. Its energy diversification, its economic resilience, its governance strength, its digital preparedness, and its civic trust. Most evidently its foresighted ability to propose and build the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline connection to the port of Fujairah nearly two decades ago, foresaw the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint. The United Arab Emirates’ dual coast position turned a shock into a gain, mitigating some of the disruption experienced by its Hormuz dependent neighbours, and raising the value of what it had built. The United Arab Emirates' forty years of preparation created its readiness.
In commercial real estate, locations that exhibit readiness are structurally underpriced. This is due to two reinforcing reasons. The missing instrument is first. As we know markets can price the present and with limited ability robustness. But evidently they have no standard ability that prices the quality of becoming stronger under stress. Seemingly the defining quality of these locations are invisible to the tools that value them. Secondly, readiness is chronically under-rewarded. This is because the proof of good readiness is a disaster that did not happen, which is an averted loss no one can see, and ultimately a cost that is invisible on a budget. Readiness is both difficult to read and challenging to hold. For Berkof and our location focused clients, readiness is a niche worth occupying as both of these forces push its price below its worth. Readiness is the instrument that makes the invisible quality visible. This makes it high-value, under explored, and high impact. For Berkof, readiness is not a risk metric, but an opportunity metric that is measured as a gap.
The readiness gap and the instrument that measures it
The readiness gap is two numbers and the distance between them. The first number is viability. That is where a location stands today. The second is readiness. That is where the location is heading. Berkof’s AI illustrates this through two lenses. One is forward looking and opportunity oriented. The second is diagnostic and readiness oriented. Berkof weighs them equally before any trajectory adjustment is applied. A location scoring 80 on current viability but 20 on future readiness is not 50. For Berkof present strength built on absent readiness evidently shows the kind of value that does not survive contact with a shock. Berkof's readiness analysis can show that two locations can screen almost identical on current fundamentals such as yield, and occupancy, but diverge sharply when you measure the direction the location is heading. We call that divergence the readiness gap and it informs location opportunity, which is at the heart of Berkof’s mission. This divergence is invisible to most location analytics tools but it is where the opportunity can be found. This document illustrates the locations that clear their current viability considerably. This illustrates the rarity of readiness and turns the gap from a description into an indicator of location opportunity.
The readiness gap is formulated through Berkof AI’s five-layer pipeline. Raw structured and unstructured data signals are ingested first. Berkof’s scoring methodology specifies a wide field of independent and proprietary live data drawn from satellite, government, financial, demographic, climate, infrastructure, and policy sources. An intelligence layer normalises and translates these signals into interpreted indicators projecting each one forward across five, ten, and twenty year horizons. These are benchmarked against dynamically assembled cohorts of comparable places with their own confidence scored by how dense, and how primary the underlying data is. A dimension layer then aggregates the indicators into scored domains and normalises each on a percentage scale against the global universe of locations. A lens layer then produces the two example scores shown above. Finally a decision layer combines them into a single composite score and produces a structured output: tier, trajectory, confidence, narrative, key drivers, and risk flags.
The most decisive move occurs in the decision layer. The two service scores are combined and then adjusted by a Trajectory Modifier. The Trajectory Modifier is a value of up to ten points in either direction, which is set by the rate of change across every domain over a rolling twenty-four months. The modifier converts a static snapshot of a location into a directional instrument and it does this by rewarding places that invest ahead of need. Berkof’s methodology calculates points towards locations that are accelerating their foundations. There is a long engineering pedigree to this approach. After the Great Stink of 1858, Joseph Bazalgette was charged with building London’s sewer systems. With foresight and readiness in mind Bazalgette doubled the diameter of every pipe on the reasoning that the system would be built only once and the unforeseen was certain. That is that the network was built for a city of two million but still serves one many times larger today. Berkof developed the Trajectory Modifier to enable this kind of foresight. Berkof AI enables both anticipatory readiness and prices it.
Berkof’s approach to readiness is strictly governed by constraints, and boundaries. Importantly Berkof analyses readiness through three distinct lenses; Thrive, Attract, and Adapt, to specifically question three explicit futures most relevant to location focused clients. Thrive asks; Will this place lead sustainable change over the next 20 years? Attract asks; Will this place attract and retain the people and capital needed? Adapt asks; Will this place remain viable as climate uncertainty intensifies? Firstly, readiness only has meaning relative to an assumed distribution of futures. The three lenses specifically focus on explicit futures which ensures Berkof’s methodology and location scoring is indexed to a future model of risk or opportunity. Secondly, readiness is governed by its minimum rather than its average. A location is only as ready as its least-ready essential system. A structurally stable city grid does not compensate for an exhausted water table. Berkof resolves this by surfacing the binding constraint rather than letting a high domain mask a low one. Thirdly, is that readiness is perishable. As we have seen it is a flow rather than a stock. Skills can lapse, defences can age, institutional memory can fade. Readiness that is held without continuous expenditure trends towards zero. For Berkof this is why measuring the rate of change and not merely the level is critical. The Trajectory Modifier mitigates perishability by allowing clients to read the rate of change on the slope.
Berkof’s readiness methodology integrates these constraints to eliminate any risk of measured readiness and real readiness coming apart. It is important that location readiness is calculated on tangible elements that support readiness across a number of different scenarios; such as physical infrastructure in relation to climate risk, but also the somewhat intangible and harder to measure line items; such as civic trust, coordination, and political will. The latter being equally important as they govern any response to future risks. One scenario without the other does not measure readiness but rather measures a checklist.
‘The more valuable question, on a twenty year horizon, is which locations will be strengthened by the next two decades of disruption’.
Three lenses, one question
Will this place lead sustainable change over the next twenty years? The Thrive lens measures the capacity to sustain value through the climate transition. This means identifying whether a location has the readiness fundamentals from grid stability to governance quality to keep it viable over the horizon.
Will this place attract and retain the people and capital we need? The Attract lens measures the enduring pull of talent, technology, capital and demand. The movement of highly skilled people and the depth of technological infrastructure and digital readiness, are now the most sensitive leading indicators of where a location is heading. These indicators precede capital, investment, and growth.
Will this place remain viable as climate uncertainty intensifies? The Adapt lens measures the readiness and pace of physical risk response to identify the locations set to remain viable, absorb-climate driven population and capital flows, and emerge stronger. This inverts the dominant frame of climate analytics as a purely risk index.
When read cumulatively these lenses answer a single but critical question. Will this location compound value or erode it? The most revealing insights are the divergences which is where these three lenses disagree. The ten cities in the upcoming index best illustrate these findings.
Adapt: the reframe of climate risk
‘The adapt lens focuses on the inversion of climate risk. A warming world relocates people, and someone receives them’.
The Netherlands is a tangible example of the Adapt lens in practice. By raw hazard The Netherlands is one of the most flood exposed territories on earth. It is also one of the safest places in the world to hold a physical asset due to its engineered readiness. Summarised The Netherlands is raw hazard high yet real risk low. The Dutch have recognised this paradox over the last four centuries. For Berkof our approach is grounded not in the engineering but in the pricing.
Berkof’s flagship Adapt lens ‘Readiness Adjusted Risk’ agentic solution for commercial estate clients is a formalistion of this innovation. A raw hazard score is discounted by what the location has already built against it: Adjusted Risk = Raw Hazard × (1 − cap × readiness factor), where the cap reflects how much of each hazard engineering can realistically absorb. Berkof’s methodology places critical importance on the caps. Flooding 0.70, water stress 0.65, extreme heat 0.55, sea-level rise 0.50. The last is the lowest because sea-level rise can be attenuated but never engineered out of existence. When we take an example in the Japanese city of Osaka we can see the ‘Readiness Adjusted Risk’ agentic solution for commercial real estate in operation. A broker has applied a flood-zone discount; a raw coastal-flood screen returns 68. This would generally stall any deal at a committee meeting. Berkof’s analysis shows that the parcel drains behind a storm-surge system built to a one-in-150-year standard and reinforced after Typhoon Jebi in 2018. A physical-infrastructure domain in the mid-eighties drives a location-readiness factor of 80, which through the 0.70 flood cap absorbs more than half of the raw hazard: 68 × (1 − 0.70 × 0.80) =30. Berkof’s takeaway insight is that the market has priced a hazard the location had already engineered away. Berkof defines this as subtraction as an investment discipline.
The Adapt lens frames an important paradox. An asset in drought cannot be rerouted around its water table. The Adapt lens prices the un-bypassable resources such as grid stability, or a stable climate envelope. Berkof shows that these are the ones that decide durable location value. The Adapt lens measures readiness aimed at durable forces that compound. When Adelaide faced a future structural water deficit the city developed its desalination capacity ahead of the future need.
The Adapt lens is underpinned by defensible, auditable, and measurable data. Signals such as water security, which is read from watershed level stress data and satellite groundwater monitoring sources. Data is projected under the standard 1.5°C, 2°C and 3°C scenarios. Signals such as the national vulnerability and readiness scores and multi-hazard indices sit behind the governance preparedness domains.
The Adapt lens also focuses on the inversion of climate risk. A warming world relocates people, and someone receives them. Christchurch and Canberra are positioned to absorb climate-driven domestic and overseas inflows of population and capital. Berkof’s insights show that this transforms climate from a discount into a demand opportunity. Berkof’s opportunity index is the only instrument built to illustrate this opportunity. In the financial layer this lands as a hard number: CapEx Risk = (100 −Adapt) × 0.85. The lower a location's Adapt score, the steeper the future adaptation spend an underwriter must reserve against, and the opposite for a location that has already been built.
Attract: the inversion of location logic
The Attract lens analyses the ability of locations to host, deploy, and deliver increasingly important location bound compute assets and people-agentic workforces’.
Berkof’s Attract lens focuses on two independent signals that are increasingly important when read combined. These are people and technology. Talent flow and technological infrastructure depth are two of the most prescient indicators of where places are heading. When assessed cumulatively these metrics signal to clients, already recognised and increasingly important drivers of opportunity - highly skilled people, and the investment and deployment of advanced technology, and digital infrastructure build-out for artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
The Attract lenses first factor - people, analyses the sequence of two important data flows; talent agglomerates, and capital flows, as real estate opportunity follows people and capital. The Attract lens starts with talent flow as talent moves before any other signal and is the primary indicator that precedes capital. Berkof’s AI enables Talent Flow Intelligence to be understood as the premise; flow is the leading edge, observable in near real time profile location changes, hiring activity, and graduate destinations. Talent Flow is the premise as this shows up long before census, population count and rent data.
Berkof’s Attract lens shows that Talent Flow reveals that attraction and retention are entirely different assets. Berkof’s methodology scores Net Talent Velocity, who is arriving against who is leaving, separately from Talent Retention Rate, the rate at which a place keeps the people it has. When we look at cities such as Ho Chi Minh City, we see that it often retains people far better than it attracts. While Budapest shows a similar finding. Generally the market only reads attraction and therefore Berkof developed its methodology and scoring framework to place equal attention on retention. Retention is more durable, has a less cyclical demand base, and is often invisible as the emphasis is predominantly placed on attraction. Berkof has added weight to the Attract methodology by analysing Migration Momentum which is the rate at which Talent Velocity itself is accelerating. Momentum is a precise capture of readiness as it tends to indicate a location's asymmetric upside potential.
Unused access is a term that arises frequently in Berkof’s upcoming 2026 Readied Cities Index. This pertains to factors such as infrastructure, and connectivity built ahead of the demand that will use it. History and the present are peppered with examples of this. The 19th century saw the development and building of the railway infrastructure. Towns and economies grew around it rather than the town summoning the railway line. Berkof defines Unused access as latent capacity. That is readiness held in reserve but not yet assigned to a use. Latent capacity is the critical element of readiness. When a location's unused access is optimised there is always a risk that readiness will be prematurely liquidated. An electrical grid with spare capacity can appear as slack that could be optimized and cut. However this is premature as unused access is often the reason why demand arrives in the first place.
Berkof’s methodology inverts the Attract lenses first factor in the other direction to offer a new dimension. For two centuries people moved to the work location. Increasingly habitability factors such as quality of life, and affordability, are inverting this logic. For the highly skilled knowledge worker, work increasingly moves to where people already want to be. Habitability has become a leading economic input rather than just a lifestyle element. The findings show that cities like Adelaide and Canberra are increasingly recognised as habitable hot spots. They have used their readiness momentum to transform lifestyle, affordability, and high quality of life into an economic advantage.
The Attract lenses second factor - technological infrastructure depth and compute, is increasingly becoming one of the most important considerations for location focused clients. Compute readiness is the readiness of power, cooling, water, land, regulatory context, and fiber to host the next decade of infrastructure, is the next readiness frontier that needs particular attention. The data-centre is the most location bound asset class of the artificial intelligence era. One of the most novel insights of the index is that demand will increasingly arrive through the network alongside the airport. The physical requirements of asset classes such as data-centres are inherently bound to physicalities; substrate, terrain, and geography. Berkof AI reads these physicalities. Solar and wind potential, electrification and grid data, and an open infrastructure layer that locates exchanges, ports and renewable installations. Technological infrastructure depth and compute capacity is the physical build out of the artificial intelligence and quantum computing economy. The Attract lens quantifies and analyses the readiness ability of locations to host, deploy, and deliver increasingly critical location based compute requirements. Can this location support the energy, cooling, and water requirements for a data centre? Or, If this data-centre will generate its own energy, can the location’s grid support its surplus supply?
The findings in this section of the index show two further insights. Firstly, demographics and population decline and secondly, data-localisation laws re-territorialising compute. Much of the developed world is shrinking with falling population numbers and increasingly ageing societies predominating. The readiness gap shows the difference between a city that concentrates a falling national population and one that hollows out alongside it. Compute and the cloud are transitioning back into real estate. Strong data sovereignty and governance in cities, including Ottawa and Canberra, are showing that sovereignty is becoming a priced locational attribute. Similarly jurisdiction’s regulatory positions are becoming a tangible input for where compute, servers, and leases can sit for the long-term.
Another insight the index discusses is the workplace of this era and the future. Berkof’s research shows that the successful locations of the future will be those that attract and retain people with specialist skills in technology orchestration, supervision, and judgement. Locations that can develop, host, and support hybrid people-agentic workforces will attract opportunity and capital. The Ottawa-Christchurch cross city analysis pairing are two cities whose working days barely overlap. The cross city findings match them deliberately. Both cities' domains show a sharp disclosure. The cities are positioned so that a continuous fleet of agents can stay under human supervision across almost two-thirds of the day. These cities don’t share the same market or region. Both cities do share correlated readiness. That is clean power, grid stability, water security, civic trust, specialist skills, sovereign compute and timezone complementarity. For Berkof these are the emerging characteristics of locations that are readying themselves for an explicitly defined future they have imagined. Characteristics that are intensely bound to geography, and place but for a new and emerging future.
Thrive: the energy substrate
The Thrive lens analyses how infrastructure and the operational requirements for clean power, grid stability and energy independence is driving location demand'.
For Berkof, the Thrive lens illustrates one of the most novel and counterintuitive findings across the index. That is infrastructure depth precedes the energy transition. Tokyo and Osaka have developed world-class physical platforms across digital, transit, and institutional capacity. Osaka and Tokyo’s grid is still predominantly four-fifths fossil fuelled. Osaka and Tokyo’s renewable energy policy is materialising ahead of 2030. The infrastructure platform is built and waiting to accommodate the translation of policy into outcome. The opportunity for clients sits in the interim, within the infrastructure that is built, prior to the policy materializing. For clients positioning or reorienting green funds across Asia-Pacific, the opportunity lies in the infrastructure adjacent to the renewables.
The Thrive lens leans into a frame that inventors are well accustomed to. The index illustrates how a baseload power source is worth more than an intermittent one of equal nameplate capacity. Baseload power sources hold through stress. Berkof’s findings show how locations work the same way. Our Bucharest findings show how the city's non-intermittent hydro-power capacity outranks the intermittent capacity of its peers. This is for the same reason as a baseload power capacity holds - it holds through stress. Also exemplifying this is Adelaide's climate scenario independence. It is viable across the range of warming pathways and is the locational equivalent of baseload. Coupled with that Adelaide’s grid already runs past the fifty-percent mark on renewables. Berkof’s AI reads these signals from authoritative and proprietary energy feeds including; renewables share, decarbonisation rate, clean-energy investment flows, and general potential by geospatial coordinate.
A key insight from the Thrive lens is that energy ceases to become an operating cost-line and becomes a locational asset. What the findings make clear is that for a city with the platform already built, every point of grid decarbonisation lifts multiple lens domains at once. For clients it shows that the AI build-out’s infrastructure and operational pipeline for clean power, grid stability and energy independence converts Bucharest, Adelaide, and Canberra into demand locations. Berkof makes this insight visible in the Thrive Financial Layer - (OpEx Risk = (100 − Thrive) × 0.55). A strong Thrive score is a structurally lower operating cost over the hold period and also before any efficiency retrofit.
An increasingly important insight the Lens findings make clear is the role of the insurer and bluelining. Berkof deliberates that this insight is important as it is the one that is the deciding factor for whether a location stays investable. Increasingly the insurer is the real arbiter, rather than the planner or investor. Insurers are beginning to withdraw cover from whole districts on hazard grounds. An asset that cannot be insured cannot in practice be financed or sold, regardless of how sound the asset is itself. Berkof’s readiness adjusted risk solution, drawing on the same flood and heat exposure data the insurer uses, is a forward read of where insurance capital will stand a decade out. Berkof AI enables clients to make visible the underlying risk conditions that strand assets. A location no insurer will cover is a stranded asset.
Why this matters to institutional capital and commercial real estate
Firstly, Berkof AI enables clients to change the unit of analysis when making location decisions. What is clear is that stranded assets are the concern. Readiness moves that concern to the location level. Berkof’s capabilities can show how a declining readiness city can strand a good asset. While due diligence may find the asset itself to be in standing order, the place beneath it may be slowly eroding. A rising-readiness location de-risks ordinary assets. That also pertains to mediocre assets which can be carried upwards by a location that is compounding. Berkof enables clients to see the place as the position and the asset as the expression of it.
Secondly, Berkof’s findings show that prime has decoupled from primary. The ten cities illustrated in Berkof’s index are mostly secondary and third cities by convention. Osaka sits below Tokyo, Ottawa beneath Toronto, and Adelaide beneath Sydney. Berkof highlights that the mispricing and the opportunity is found in that gap and readiness makes that visible. Prime, when properly understood, is a statement about the quality of a location’s forward trajectory. While primary is a statement about its size and liquidity today. What Berkof’s evidence finds distinguishes between stability that has never been tested and a positive, measured trajectory. Often prime markets exhibit stability that has never been tested and is mistaken for safety until the day that it is not. Berkof’s findings show that prime markets’ calm is often an unproven calm. The secondary markets illustrated in this chapter exhibit a measured trajectory which is often elusive in prime markets.
Thirdly relates to duration. Pension, sovereign and insurance mandates carry liabilities twenty and thirty years out, and the only honest question for that capital is which locations are still investable when the liability matures. Berkof AI allows clients to answer this directly through our solutions. The three lenses combine into a single composite, equally weighted by default, but a client can reweight to its own horizon. Whether that be a thirty-year infrastructure mandate weighting Adapt to 50% and Thrive to 30%, or a corporate occupier weighting Attract to 60%. Berkof’s solutions flags any material divergence between the default and the client-weighted score as a decision signal in its own right.
The fourth one is that Berkof has designed and calculated its readiness framework, methodology and scoring as a timing instrument. It enables clients to price the divergence between two assets a conventional screen would call identical. It enables clients to surface the location whose trajectory the market is reading as a verdict when it is only a lag. Berkof’s findings consistently discover that when divergence between lenses a recurring pattern occurs - High Thrive, High Adapt, Low Attract. This insight signals strong regenerative foundations, genuine climate resilience, and a place the market has not simply noticed yet. This insight is the most common profile of an undiscovered location. Berkof AI enables clients to surface insights such as these across their portfolios before the market catches up.
One of the most insightful findings we wanted to highlight is in relation to timing. Readiness gaps compound. A location whose readiness is recognised attracts capital; that capital funds further readiness; the gap widens before it closes. Advantages accrue disproportionately to whoever is able to read the gap first. It is the intention of Berkof to assist clients with this journey, to surface the readiness gap and articulate location opportunity.
For Berkof and our clients, the value of readiness is invisible right up to the moment it becomes the only element that matters. Readiness has a window, and the window does not stay open indefinitely. As we have seen with The United Arab Emirates example, the time to prepare was forty years ago. For Berkof there is also a deeper reason why we see readiness as an under explored method for understanding and actioning location opportunity. A place can only be ready for the futures it can imagine. Readiness begins as an act of imagination. The locations that will thrive in an increasingly uncertain world are those that have the discipline to picture which forces, risks, and opportunities will arrive and what it will take to meet them. Measuring readiness is a way of making that imagination legible, comparable and early enough to act on. Berkof’s 2026 Readied Cities Index does not set out to illustrate these ten cities as forecasts. Rather they are the locations where the conditions for opportunity are already present and already measurable. At Berkof we provide the solutions to enable clients to read them. History tells us that the market will reprice them in time but only after the future has arrived and the opportunity has gone.
Readiness will not tell you what the next twenty years will hold. Rather it will tell you which locations are ready for them. For us at Berkof, in an increasingly complex world, this is the more valuable fact to know.
The ‘2026 Readied Cities Index’ will be released in July. Sign up to our newsletter, The Berkof Briefing, for fresh perspectives, news, and views on the locations shaping the future.