cities of the future essay

This is what the cities of the future could look like

Social and environmental issues are now prevalent in futuristic city design. Image:  REUTERS/Tim Chong

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Nick Dunn

Paul cureton.

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:, sdg 11: sustainable cities and communities.

• Visions for the cities of the future have often been based around the potential of future technology.
• But, recent research suggests its important to consider issues from sustainability to tackling social inequalities.
• These projects could give a window into our lives in the future.

Imagining future cities has long been a favourite activity for architects, artists and designers . Technology is often central in these schemes – it appears as a dynamic and seemingly unstoppable force, providing a neat solution to society’s problems.

But our recent research has suggested that we need to significantly rethink the way we imagine future cities , and move our focus from an overarching technological vision to other priorities, such as environmental sustainability and the need to tackle social inequalities.

We need to answer questions about what can be sustained and what cannot, where cities can be located and where they cannot, and how we might travel in and between them.

The coronavirus pandemic has further reinforced this need. It has profoundly disrupted what we thought we knew about cities . It has further sharpened existing inequalities and brought about major challenges for how we physically live and work together.

Have you read?

How teaching 'future resilient' skills can help workers adapt to automation, why dockless bikes are the symbol of our future cities, to build cities fit for the future, we need to think differently.

The future – yesterday

The architect and influential urban planner Eugène Hénard was arguably the first to publicly discuss “future cities” in Europe during his 1910 address to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. His vision anticipated the technological advances of the future, such as aerial transportation. This approach, prioritising technology, was also evoked in cinema in Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis .

It was also mirrored by architects such as Le Corbusier in projects such as the 1924 Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) . In this work, Le Corbusier developed his concept of the city as a symmetrical, regulated, and highly centralised landscape.

Such an approach can be traced through many subsequent visions for cities, portrayed as the physical embodiment of technological prowess.

A new focus

But rather than simply focusing on technology to shape our future, we also need to look at it through social and global lenses. These alternative approaches are increasingly urgent. To provide a safe and sustainable world for present and future populations, we need to think beyond “solutionism”. This is the idea that every problem we have has a technological fix.

An identifiable shift in how future cities are being conceived, designed and delivered concerns the people involved in these processes. This ranges from localised projects to global initiatives. For example, the Every One Every Day project in Barking and Dagenham in London aims to make practical participation in neighbourhood projects inclusive and available to all residents. On a much wider scale, the New Urban Agenda global vision by the United Nations’ Habitat programme, meanwhile, calls for more inclusive and sustainable urbanisation and settlement planning.

We may want our future cities to prioritise environmental renewal. The Green Machine , a design for a future city by architect Stephane Malka, moves like a mobile oasis, replenishing desert rather than causing more environmental degradation. This future city collects water through air condensation and uses solar power to drive itself over arid landscapes.

These are ploughed and injected with a mixture of water, natural fertiliser and cereal seeds as it passes. Agricultural greenhouses along with livestock farms support the city’s inhabitants and supplement local populations. The project is scaleable and replicable in relation to the number of people needed to be accommodated.

Climate change brings with it the possibility of dramatic sea level rise. Post Carbon City-State , a project by architecture and urban design group Terreform, imagines a submerged New York. The project proposes that, rather than investing in mitigation efforts, the East and Hudson River are allowed to flood parts of Manhattan.

The new city is rebuilt in its surrounding rivers. Former streets become snaking arteries of liveable spaces, embedded with renewable energy resources, green vehicles, and productive nutrient zones. This replaces the current obsession with private car ownership towards more ecological forms of public transport.

Both these projects emphasise responses to the impacts of climate change over technological innovation for its own sake.

Alternatively, the cities of the future may prioritise equality. This is illustrated by spatial design agency 5th Studio’s Stour City, The Enabling State .

This is a future city for 60,000 inhabitants, envisioned along the River Stour and the Port of Harwich in East Anglia, England. Based around the urbanisation and intensification of existing rail and port infrastructure, it features initiatives such as waste to power generation in order to support a viable, low-impact city, with priorities including affordable housing for all.

Imagining these cities helps us understand how we want our future lives to look. But we must open up the opportunity to conceptualise these futures to a wider and more diverse set of people. By doing so, we will be better positioned to rethink the shifts required to safeguard our health, that of other species and the planet we share. This is the significance of visions for tomorrow’s world – and why we need to create new ones today.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

The Agenda .chakra .wef-n7bacu{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-weight:400;} Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

.chakra .wef-1dtnjt5{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;} More on Urban Transformation .chakra .wef-17xejub{-webkit-flex:1;-ms-flex:1;flex:1;justify-self:stretch;-webkit-align-self:stretch;-ms-flex-item-align:stretch;align-self:stretch;} .chakra .wef-nr1rr4{display:-webkit-inline-box;display:-webkit-inline-flex;display:-ms-inline-flexbox;display:inline-flex;white-space:normal;vertical-align:middle;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:0.75rem;border-radius:0.25rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;line-height:1.2;-webkit-letter-spacing:1.25px;-moz-letter-spacing:1.25px;-ms-letter-spacing:1.25px;letter-spacing:1.25px;background:none;padding:0px;color:#B3B3B3;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;box-decoration-break:clone;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;}@media screen and (min-width:37.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:0.875rem;}}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:1rem;}} See all

Why nature-positive cities can help transform the planet

Carlos Correa Escaf

May 24, 2024

European cities embrace nature-based solutions and other urban transformation stories you need to read

Lisa Chamberlain

May 23, 2024

India has the highest number of road accident fatalities – but one man’s determination has reduced that figure by 40%. Here’s how

Johnny Wood

May 15, 2024

How this country is encouraging green mobility

Anna Paula Brito

The fascinating link between biodiversity and mental wellbeing

Andrea Mechelli

San Francisco leads the way in sustainable urban development with Yes SF

Alison Hagan

Prediction: The City of the Future Essay

City of the future essay: introduction, city in the future essay: body paragraph, cities of the future essay: conclusion, cities of the future essay: our sample’s benefits.

Welcome to our essay about city in the future! Here, you will find an exciting prediction of what a futuristic city may look like. We hope it will inspire you and give you ideas for a great “city of the future” essay!

The “city of the future” will react to the issues experienced in the city of today. Most of the population resides in urban regions because of the opportunities available in these areas. However, urban regions encounter problems such as discrimination, unemployment, poverty, and crime. To tackle these issues, the future city will be less dense and develop solutions for urban and rural residents. Future cities will be characterized by green areas, sustainable practices, and hi-tech innovations. The green areas will not be integrated only for esthetic purposes but will be installed to improve comfort and well-being. For the city to be sustainable, it must be characterized by public open beautiful, and maintainable areas. The cities will have diverse transportation systems and will offer appealing incentives for different transportation systems. Facilities and architectural structures are the largest users of resources. The “city of the future” must shift toward ecologically sustainable and electricity efficient structures that cut down water and water use. Recycling will be a major characteristic of future cities and efficient waste management systems and facilities will motivate citizens’ recycling attitudes.

The “city of the future” will have hi-tech characteristics that will enable virtual city management via wireless networks, Internet applications, and power sensors. Citizens will have instant information on traffic, weather, congestion data, availability of public transportation, and bicycle users. The future city will provide optimal life quality, and improve the comfort and health of individuals who work and live within the cities. Inhabitable cities are socially accommodative, accessible, inexpensive, secure, healthy, and resistant to the influence of environmental changes. These cities have attractive natural and built environs.

The ease of communication characteristic to the city may increase the complexity of information management for security systems. The city of the future will comprise a complex system of data exchange between people and business organizations and this may cause an increase in identity theft. Security is a major determinant of an ideal city and the prevalence of identity theft in the city of the future may reduce the comfort and convenience associated with easy information sharing. To guarantee the safety of its residents, the government of the city of the future must focus on improving its database security systems. Security departments systems may need to be expanded to encompass civilians and military due to the complexity associated with big data security, and the role of the public in generating and using data in the city of the future.

Here’s what makes our “city of the future” essay stand out:

• Text Analysis with Systemic Functional Grammar Framework
• Electronic Health Record and Health Policy
• What Is a Tsunami and What Causes Them?
• Laser Communication Links in Space
• Causal Loop Diagram as a Specific Visualization Tool
• Fibrous Aerosol Filters and Their Evolution
• Dubai Technological Advancement: the Smart City
• Toughening Mechanisms for Epoxies Quality Improvement
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, January 16). Prediction: The City of the Future Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prediction-the-city-of-the-future/

"Prediction: The City of the Future Essay." IvyPanda , 16 Jan. 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/prediction-the-city-of-the-future/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Prediction: The City of the Future Essay'. 16 January.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Prediction: The City of the Future Essay." January 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prediction-the-city-of-the-future/.

1. IvyPanda . "Prediction: The City of the Future Essay." January 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prediction-the-city-of-the-future/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Prediction: The City of the Future Essay." January 16, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/prediction-the-city-of-the-future/.

• Smart Cities
• Sustainability

The City of the Future: This is How Cities are Becoming Smart

Cities are evolving, and innovation plays a huge role in this transformation. Almost 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers learned the secrets of selective breeding and agriculture and managed to grow their food. For the first time in history, humans found a way to survive without moving to a different territory to find new food sources. And that’s how everything started.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that modern cities as we know them appeared. New technologies deployed on a mass scale allowed these vast communities to grow faster than ever before.

Innovation has always been vital to improve and prevent communities from collapsing. Cities need sanitation systems, properly-built homes, and secure public transportation. And the list goes on forever. Even if we’ve evolved a lot since hunter-gatherers changed the course of history, there’s still much left to be done.

What is the future of cities?

As cities become increasingly populated and resources more and more sparse, cities need to focus on achieving smart growth . There’s no time for it to be a thing of the future - the future of cities is now.

Thankfully, many cities are already focusing on becoming smart and sustainable cities by implementing practices such as the circular economy, and smart mobility, helping reduce carbon footprint in urban areas.

Check out this short video of our action-packed Travel & Smart Cities EXPO 3 in Vienna, which brings fresh perspectives to the innovation landscape in the CEE region.

The city of the future: What are the challenges?

What will the city of the future look like? There is not one good answer.

Cities are made by the people inhabiting them, and people are profoundly affected by culture and the city itself. Thus, two cities facing the same problem might need two different solutions.

And that’s the main challenge encountered when developing a smart city. A smart city is not just a city that uses cutting-edge technology. It’s a city that carefully studies the habits and the needs of its citizens and tries to fix them in the most suitable way.

Image source .

But even though the solutions might differ, s ome main challenges affect most cities:

Smart mobility for the city of the future

Traffic consistently ranks as one of the main problems affecting cities. If there’s ever such a thing as the perfect smart city, smart mobility will play a key role. But let’s clarify something before anyone gets confused.

How 21st-Century Planning is Different

Governments have always tried to foresee potential problems and fix those already happening. However, the approach to solving these problems is radically different. For example, some decades ago, the solution to busy highways was to add a new lane.

Simple, right? Well, maybe not so much.

What seemed like an excellent way to reduce congestion brought, in fact, poor results. Adding a new lane didn’t reduce traffic, instead, it attracted new drivers who didn’t use that route. Cities ended up with equally congested roads (only, this time, they had an extra lane full of vehicles.)

The city of the future will face problems differently. Those trying to create a smart city should look at the main challenges of mobility from different points of view and ask questions like: Do we need that many cars? Should we own cars, or should we share them ? Would it be preferable to have autonomous vehicles ? The possibilities are endless, and the answers vary depending on the city.

So, back to mobility.

Some of the main elements that will shape mobility in the city of the future are:

• Shared Mobility : Ride-hailing services have been growing steadily for years. And every indication suggests that they will keep doing so. The city of the future is, without a doubt, a city where people will share transportation methods such as cars, motorbikes, or scooters. Why own a car when there’s such a thing as Mobility As A Service or MaaS?
• Electric vehicles : Electric cars are becoming more popular every year, but cities have a long way to go until they’re fully prepared to “host” these types of vehicles. The number of charging stations available is still low, and grid capacity needs to be improved (nowadays, it still needs to be fully prepared to charge vehicles such as electric buses.) These are some of the problems that get in the way of the mass adoption of electric cars, and cities will need to face them soon.
• Traffic Management : Traffic is one of the main problems for urban areas worldwide. Fortunately, new solutions are coming up daily to try to fix this problem (or at least mitigate its consequences). Cities are developing systems to try to address this issue. Pittsburgh, for example, deployed a video and radar to analyze traffic in 50 intersections and adjusts signals in real-time. This AI-based system has reduced travel times by 26% and vehicle emissions by 21%.

Buildings in cities of the future aren’t just buildings

Nowadays, 50% of the total human population lives in cities. Studies predict that 35 years from now, that percentage will rise to 75%. That means we need to find a home for 3 billion people in just 35 years.

And, if we want future cities to be smart cities, only some buildings are good enough. We need our skyline to be made up of buildings that are, amongst other things:

• Sustainable : The buildings where we work and live create almost 50% of CO2 emissions on the planet. Smart buildings are designed with sustainability in mind. This means low-energy houses, natural materials (like cork, clay, or recycled paper), renewable energy use, or waste reduction.
• Secure : We’re discussing buildings with integrated fire prevention systems or intrusion and access control - Protecting the building’s systems from hackers is also essential.
• Cost-efficient : There are many ways in which a smart building helps its inhabitants save money. It detects occupancy patterns and adapts to how much energy it consumes. Cooling and ventilation are regulated automatically. Sensors can see potential maintenance problems and stop them before they happen. And so much more.

IoT: The core technology upon which a city in the future is built

Without the Internet of Things, smart cities wouldn’t exist. These intelligent, interconnected cities rely on data collection for everything . And that is what IoT sensors do: they collect data and feed it into a platform to be analyzed.

In the city of the future, devices must be able to communicate with each other so that decisions can be made. Authorities must work hand in hand with network operators to position several connectivity points throughout the city to ensure proper communication.

The cities of the future will be sustainable (and this is not an option)

Sustainability is key in the development of any smart city, and it’s related to other challenges:

• Waste management : Smart cities need to face different problems related to waste management, such as overfilled trash bins, unoptimized truck routes, or the need to separate mixed materials for recycling. Smart waste management can help solve these kinds of issues. Sensors attached to trash bins can measure fill level, send an automatic alert if it reaches the limit, and optimize trucks’ collection routes.
• Energy : “ The city of the future will definitely be energy-efficient. It might even produce energy instead of consuming it. The main challenge is convincing companies and governments to invest more in this area, " said Daniyar Tanatov’s, Partner Account Manager at Spaceti. Cities can produce more energy than they consume by using turbines, solar panels or even solar walls - buildings with solar panels incorporated into their facade.
• Working hours : Unexpected, maybe? Current working hours vastly exceed what we could consider sustainable, concluded research conducted by the think tank Autonomy . Fewer working hours would mean less commuting, fewer products manufactured, and fewer resources used. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence could help make the future of work sustainable.

The city of the future: Who is behind it?

Startups play a crucial role when it comes to finding new solutions to build the city of the future.

Smart cities' challenges are endless, and public institutions and large corporations can’t come up with all the solutions we need. Some of the most brilliant (and passionate) minds are in startups like Gaia Smart Cities, Recycle Smart, and Smart Air. For corporations, these startups are a threat but also an opportunity.

At Plug and Play’s Smart Cities accelerator , we match large corporations with top-tier startups that are changing the world as we know it. Together, they’ll build the cities of the future. Want to know more? Join our platform today.

Building the City of the Future

Read the rest of the collection..

Mobility, IoT, sustainability, and more. Smart cities will revolutionize the way we live.

What is Corporate Innovation?

• Corporate Innovation

9 Smart Cities Startups That Are Reshaping Cities As We Know Them

What's The Future of Finance? This Is Our Prediction For 2020

Cities of the Future

Challenges and Opportunities

• Conference proceedings
• © 2022
• Mady Mohamed   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6831-176X 0 ,
• Asmaa Ibrahim   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3079-0763 1 ,
• Mohamed Fekry 2

Effat University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

• Key presentations from the 6th International Conference on Cities of the Future
• Embraces novel approaches to pursue a vision of smart inclusive cities
• Provides a cross-sectoral, multi-scale contributions for development of future cities

6898 Accesses

5 Citations

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

About this book

​This book seeks to address the key challenges and opportunities of "future cities" embracing novel approaches and grounded technologies in pursuing a vision for smart, inclusive cities. The objective of this book is to discuss multiple areas at the local, national, and international levels and how these challenges can hinder the development objectives planned to be achieved by the cities of the future. The chapters featured in this collection were presented at the 6th Memaryat International Conference (MIC 2022), held at the Effat University, Jeddah. MIC’s objective is to build bridges between science, technology, and innovation, seen as the key levers of attaining the SDGs.

Similar content being viewed by others

Environmental Challenges to Gray Cities Becoming Green Cities

Smart and Sustainable Urbanism with Identity in Mediterranean Cities

• Smart Cities
• Smart environmental solutions
• Community development and governance
• Smart economic solutions
• Mobility and infrastructure
• Urbanism and design
• Landscape and regional planning
• Megacities, cities and towns

Table of contents (16 papers)

Front matter, introduction.

• Mady Mohamed, Mohamed Fekry, Asmaa Ibrahim

Future of Saudi Cities

Understanding the role of innovative policies and strategies on the knowledge, attitude and practice (kap) among food handlers impacted during pandemic of covid-19.

• Nor Raihana Asmar Mohd Noor, Liziana Kamarul Zaman, Norhayati Yaacob, Muhammad Syafiq Hassan

Rijal Almaa and Local Tourism in Saudi Arabia

• Nawal Hoque, Ahd Hannawi, Asmaa Ibrahim

The Future of the City: Towards Establishing Intelligent Cities

• Walaa Mohamed Metwally, Vitta Abdel Rehim Ibrahim

Strategic Development Plan Proposed for the Future City NEOM

• Abdulaziz Nasser Aldusari

The Social Development of Neglected Open Space: The Case of Jeddah City, (A Critical Review)

• Wijdan Jamjoom, Ahmed M. Refaat

Reviving the Identity of Jeddah City Through Revitalizing the “Souq” in Al-Balad

• Hatoon S. Alghamdi, Asmaa Ibrahim

Smart Inclusive and Livable Cities

Promoting social interaction through jeddah’s neighborhood parks design.

• Hend Almohandes, Mady Mohamed

Historic Significance and the Urban Ambiance of Public Open Spaces “ Barahat ” in Old Jeddah

• Norhan Elsheny, Haitham Samir

What Factors Affect Livability? A Theoretical Review

• Shahad Oyuni, Haitham Samir

Modeling Tactical Urbanism: A Contemporary Approach for Urban Regeneration

• Tarek Saad Ragab

Child-Friendly Open Spaces: Towards Safety in Residential Neighborhoods

• Hala I. Masri, Mohamed Fekry

Smart Environmental Solutions

Role of literature in environmental conservation towards better future: a critical analysis of the poetry of sheikh ul-alam.

• Tawhida Akhter

Development Priorities of Housing Sustainability in Saudi Arabia: An Overview

• Omar S. Asfour

Investigating the Effect of Urban Form on Heat Island Phenomena: Case Study of Jeddah, KSA

• Amani Ahmad Aburuzaiza, Mady Mohamed, Tarek Saad Ragab

Sick Neighborhood Syndromes in Hot Dry Climate

• Widad Elessawi, Mady Mohamed, Mervat El-Shafie, Husam Alwaer

Editors and Affiliations

Mady Mohamed, Asmaa Ibrahim, Mohamed Fekry

About the editors

​​​ Asmaa Ibrahim  is currently the Dean of the College of Architecture & Design at Effat University. She is originally a Professor of urban development at the Arch. Dep. Faculty of Engineering, Cairo Univ. with 18 years of academic and professional experience. She was the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow in the SPURS program at MIT, USA (2018/2019). She was the main coordinator in the Double Master Program with Cottbus University in Germany, and Alex. University. She has fourteen years of experience in strategic regional and urban planning projects in UN HABITAT, GOPP, and GIZ with a focus on community development, gender programming and regeneration policies in historic districts, and new urban expansions. She has received extensive training at the World Resource Institute in Washington DC and Oxfam America in Boston in 2018/2019. She has more than 20 international publications in the field of sustainable urbanism 

Mady Mohamed  is a Professor of Architecture, joined Effat University in Fall-2014. He received his PhD degree at Dundee School of Architecture, UK on July/2009. He has more than 20 years of academic and practice experience. Through his private firm, Mady participated in the design and construction for several projects and he was the sole architect and the main architectural/LEED consultant for different residential, office, medical and educational buildings. Mady became an authorized architectural consultant by the Egyptian Syndicate for Engineering in 2013 and a LEED Green Associate by the USGBC in 2014 and. He is an authorized trainer for Education for Sustainable development ESD by the European Union/Egyptian Ministry of Education since 2014. He is a CO-Editor of EEER, IBPSA-Egypt; Editor Team Member of (EEEJ), USA; Novelty Journals, India, and a reviewer at (JEE), Canada. Also, he is a member of (SESG, Scotland), (IACSIT, Singapore), (GESTW, Egypt), (ISDS, Japan), and (AASCIT)

Mohamed Fekry  is a professor of architecture and design. He received his Masters and Ph.D. in Architecture from Cairo University, Egypt in 1999, 2004 respectively. Dr. Fekry's Ph.D. thesis entitled “THE ROLE OF CRITICISM IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION: An Experimental Model for Enhancing the Architectural Students' Critical Skills in Design Studio”. It focuses on developing one of the higher mental skills of the students of Architecture; where an experimental model was applied, which increased the students’ participation in the design studio, encouraged the students’ skills in presentation of ideas and design projects, improved the students’ ability to connect between the design concept and appropriate design solutions, and improved their ability of analysing and introducing constructive criticism of the design projects. Dr. Fekry has taught Architecture and Design in Egypt  at Cairo University between 1995 and 2009. Also, he has taught Architecture and Design in KSA at Umm Al-Qura University between 2009 and2013. He is currently teaching courses in capstone project and Design Studios at Effat University, Saudi Arabia.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Cities of the Future

Book Subtitle : Challenges and Opportunities

Editors : Mady Mohamed, Asmaa Ibrahim, Mohamed Fekry

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15460-7

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Earth and Environmental Science , Earth and Environmental Science (R0)

Copyright Information : Effat University 2022

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-15459-1 Published: 02 January 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-15462-1 Published: 03 January 2024

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-15460-7 Published: 01 January 2023

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIV, 258

Number of Illustrations : 21 b/w illustrations, 93 illustrations in colour

Topics : Human Geography , Landscape Ecology , Geography, general , Cities, Countries, Regions , Urban Economics

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Audio Version

See more about, cities of the future: challenges of architecture and design.

The urban population is expected to double in the next 40 years, forcing cities to undertake a holistic and sustainable transformation of their model. According to Martha Thorne, Dean of the IE School of Architecture and Design and Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the great challenge of architecture has to do with its capacity to create denser metropolises that have high urban quality and offer residents a better quality of life.

More than half of the world’s population already lives in urban areas, where architecture dovetails with design to make great contributions through urban services, the environment, and public spaces. Is this why the transformation of cities is getting so much attention now?

Cities are very important, not just for the world of architecture and urbanism but also for the economy and politics. In addition, the urban population is expected to double over the next 40 years, bringing about a rapid, large-scale change that has no precedent in human history. Whatever the reasons behind it, this growth pressure is having an impact on the functioning of cities, on their governance, and on quality of life. In light of this, we must ensure that cities remain spaces for innovation, culture, and well-being.

What do you think are the key factors that will allow cities to adapt to the future?

Architectural and economic aspects are important. But beyond that, challenges and solutions need to be addressed comprehensively and viewed holistically in the new city model. Reducing inequality and achieving sustainability are two objectives that should be pursued, but the challenges will vary depending on each city and its degree of development.

In European metropolises, the situation may not be as dramatic as it is in emerging countries, but this could change as a result of various factors, such as the aging of the population, the influx of refugees of war or natural disasters, and unemployment. Therefore, a key aim in Europe is to ensure that large cities are engines of sustainable economic growth where particular population segments—such as young people—can find work, whereas the goal in developing countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and India is to provide housing and basic services for all social classes. This aspect is very important not only from the standpoint of housing but also for governance and city strategy.

Reducing inequality and achieving sustainability are two objectives that should be pursued, but the challenges will vary depending on each city and its degree of development.

Will cities remain centers of innovation, culture, and well-being?

One of the great challenges we face is creating quality spaces in dense cities. Generally speaking, cities with larger populations are more efficient and better equipped to provide urban services, mobility, energy, education, and healthcare. The downside is when rapid population overgrowth produces imbalances that make the city stop working. Cities normally achieve quality of life and efficiency through the mixture of spaces, functions, and services that are accessible to the population. Another aspect to consider is that innovation and new ideas emerge in cities when there is a diversity of people, combined with substantial economic and educational activity.

I believe that architecture can contribute very directly to a city’s objectives as a center of innovation, culture, and well-being. We must change the view that architecture is an addition or a luxury to be enjoyed in boom times, and instead understand it as a reflection of our society and our values. Good architecture makes cities comfortable, accessible, etc. We live in architecture, while at the same time architecture helps to shape our collective memory. Of course, to evaluate a work of architecture, you have to consider its function, whether it’s appropriate for the particular place and time, and whether it attempts to advance some aspect of the discipline or ideas of sustainability. If you don’t take into account the economic, cultural, geographical, and topographical reality, you can’t make good, bold architecture that people will appreciate.

How has the concept of public space evolved?

It has changed and I hope it continues to evolve. In the 20 th  century, many cities were built on the basis of buildings alone. Nowadays, the nature of the areas around the buildings is what gives us the most opportunities to create quality public spaces. Today, when you build a building, it’s not enough to think of it as a sculpture or an isolated thing. It has to be considered as a “whole” with its surroundings, taking into account issues such as the mobility of people, transportation, and safety. With higher population density, urban dwellers have a greater need for open, green spaces or recreational areas. Today, we mustn’t think of a building as a singular, isolated element but rather as part of a complex of streets, infrastructure, public spaces, and other buildings that can work together, create a city, and drive change.

I’d like to point out that iconic buildings and monuments make sense if they remind us of something important. In my opinion, architecture must always be designed not only to serve the elites but also to help generate quality of life, social equality, and environmental sustainability. When we come to understand that cities are more than the sum of their parts, we will have taken a big step forward.

A key aim in Europe is to ensure that large cities are engines of sustainable economic growth.

What forces are changing the way cities are built?

You have to look at each country and city individually to understand what pressures and trends they face. In developing countries in Latin America, it might be as simple as population growth resulting from a high birth rate. In other places, you might see pressure caused by the emigration of people in critical situations brought about by natural or human disasters, such as wars—people who have had to flee their countries in search of safety. They might also be citizens in very precarious economic circumstances who harbor the hope of going to another country—or another city in their own country—in search of better opportunities. Another example is China, where government policy encourages urbanization as a driver of economic growth, contributing to the creation of large new cities.

Do cities share certain common characteristics?

I like to think of cities as systems, or ecosystems. In all cities, it is possible to analyze service quality, as well as the density of the city-dwelling population, the percentage of people who work in the city, and the modes of transportation they use. However, in all these assessments there is a limit, because we must also take into account the history of the city, which can vary greatly from case to case. We have to ask why the population is growing in each city, find out where the people who came from rural areas or other countries have ended up, and evaluate the demographics of each city to find out whether it’s aging or young.

There are also other aspects that are less obvious. We often think that quality of life is higher in cities than in rural areas, but a close examination reveals that the difference between the people in the weakest and richest economic strata is increasing. In these cities, if you drill down into the data, you can see the impoverishment of a certain segment of the urban population, and that’s very worrying.

If we think technology will solve everything and that cities should be left to the government or private investors, we won’t get very far.

What cities provide an example to follow?

On the sustainability front, some cities are producing energy and others—such as Hamburg, Germany—are recycling more waste than they generate. To take a different sort of example, New York rehabilitated a section of its railway infrastructure that had fallen into disuse—like a ghost in Manhattan—to create a park and public promenade. This initiative has revitalized the neighborhood economy and provided a recreational area for residents of all social strata, as well as for tourists.

Another good example is Medellín, Colombia, which used new models of public participation to address a very complicated situation of urban crime and informal population settlements. The city also used the construction of transport and mobility links—including aerial tramways and trolley buses—as an engine of new development. Additionally, libraries—not in the classic sense, but community cultural centers—were opened to promote the renewal of certain neighborhoods. The library buildings are of good quality, architecturally speaking, and they symbolize the concern, dedication, and future of the areas.

I think you can look at different cities and see good practices in different areas. In the case of Bilbao, I think it’s an oversimplification to say that the city’s transformation is due to the Guggenheim. It’s more complex than that. In today’s post-industrial world, Bilbao is an example of land reclamation, as well as efforts to clean up the estuary and move the port further towards the sea. I think that these factors had a larger impact on the city than the construction of the museum.

The Netherlands is a great example of water management, due to its historical relationship with the sea and its need to reclaim land. London is unremarkable in many areas, but it has managed to drastically limit the number of parking spaces in new buildings. Only people with disabilities are allowed to have a parking space. With this policy, the city has been able to limit the number of private cars. It’s an emphatic, but exemplary, stance.

Can we be optimistic about the urban transformation of cities?

If we study and replicate some of the models and practices that have been shown to work, I think we can be optimistic about the future. But if we think technology will solve everything, that cities should be left to the government or private investors, or that cities are only for those who can afford to live there, we won’t get very far. We’re all in the same boat, and if we want a positive outcome we must coordinate our actions in various areas.

APA MLA Harvard Vancouver Chicago IEEE urbanNext (May 27, 2024) Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design . Retrieved from https://urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/ . “ Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design. ” urbanNext – May 27, 2024, https://urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/ urbanNext March 23, 2018 Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design. , viewed May 27, 2024, https://urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/ > urbanNext – Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design. [Internet]. [Accessed May 27, 2024]. Available from: https://urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/ “ Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design. ” urbanNext – Accessed May 27, 2024. https://urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/ “ Cities of the Future: Challenges of Architecture and Design. ” urbanNext [Online]. Available: https://urbannext.net/cities-of-the-future/ . [Accessed: May 27, 2024]

Related Tags

Related posts, global tags.

• Interviews, debates, conversations on specific topics; also a live stream. Talk
• A magazine article – longer and more thorough, like a paper or a book chapter. Essay
• A visual representation of data, new more complex representations in terms of parameters; interactive. Data
• A project in architecture, landscape, planning. Project
• Photographic feature on cities, landscapes or specific topics. Photographic Atlas of the Cities

Sign up to our newsletter

• Biophilic Design
• Urban Mobility
• Vegetated envelopes
• Entropic urbanization
• Post-extractive practices
• Urban Metabolism
• Advanced Urbanism
• Empowering Women
• Inhabiting Landscape
• Meteorological Urbanism
• Constructing Timber
• Educational Habitats
• Urban Greening
• Textile Architecture
• Self-Sufficiency
• Socio-Ecological Design
• Urban Agriculture
• Modular Design
• Vernacular Design
• Negotiating Borders
• Transport Connections
• Walkable Cities
• Ephemeral Architecture
• Designing for Risk
• Adaptive Reuse
• Algorithmic Design
• Building with Earth
• Dealing with Nature
• Social Inclusion
• Passive Design
• Urban Catalysts
• Watery Territories
• Geographies of Extraction
• Building Living Systems
• Affordable Housing
• Indigenous Practices
• Healthy City
• Cycling Infrastructure
• Thermodynamic Systems
• Kinetic City
• Multiscale Approach
• Recycling & Upcycling
• Food Production
• Unspoiled Landscape
• Construction Ecology
• Ecologies of the Envelope
• Green Transition
• Heat Emergency
• Megablock Urbanism
• New Working Habits
• Addressing Vacancy
• Collective Housing
• On Site Robotics
• The 15-Minute City
• Biotech Architecture
• Out of Wood
• Out of Wood empreses
• Emergency Housing
• Soft Infrastructures
• Sourcing Locally
• Lightweight Envelopes
• Emergent Material Ecologies
• Extraterrestrial
• Alternative Domesticity
• Optimized Construction
• Operative Mapping
• Post-pandemic Design
• Waste Management
• Designing in Extreme Environments
• Sea Level Rise
• Performative Envelopes
• Architecture and Gender
• Inclusionary & Exclusionary Space
• Agency in Architecture
• Biomimetic Architecture
• Micro Living
• Disassembly Strategies
• De-carbonization
• Racial Justice

all formats

You may opt out or contact us anytime.

Zócalo Podcasts

Humanity Might Have Been Born to Live in Cities

Paleo-style sensibilities aside, earth’s future hinges on the success of our urban spaces.

From Machu Picchu to the Mediterranean, humans have invented and reinvented cities, over and over again. Courtesy of Poswiecie / Pixabay .

by Greg Woolf | April 26, 2021

Sometimes it feels like we made a wrong turn a long way back.

Perhaps it was the shift to fossil fuels and scientific medicine that led us to this place, a population of nearly 8 billion crowded onto a warming planet, a terrestrial species melting the ice caps so there is less and less land to inhabit or to grow food.

Or maybe it happened further back, with our jump down the food chain to become growers and eaters of grass (and maize, and rice, and sorghum). Agriculture started the slow demographic explosion of the last 10 millennia, pressing on biodiversity, and bringing on the sixth extinction. The anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott makes a strong case in his book Against the Grain that the shift to agriculture also ushered in slavery, oppressive states, and social inequality.

But it would be a mistake to see life before agriculture as the answer to our problems. Proponents of the “Paleo diet” promise personal wellbeing if we only return to pre-agricultural gastronomy. They usually stop short of suggesting we go big on protein by scavenging on the kills of big cats and hyenas, an important food source in some periods of prehistory.

So how does city life fit into all this? Is urban life another wrong turn? Should we return to the countryside—ideally, a bit of it with decent broadband and a farmers market within cycling distance? Not quite.

The spread of cities over the last 6,000 years is one of the epic themes of human history. It is well documented, since so many societies that built cities also developed writing systems. It is a global phenomenon—not because cities originated in one place and spread out over the planet, but because people invented cities, out of nothing, so many times. Ancient humans congregated and built in the valleys of Mexico, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and north China, and also in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, in the Amazon Basin, in what are now the southeastern states of the U.S., in the Andes, in the forest of southeast Asia. People probably built cities in yet-unknown other places, too, where LiDAR and satellite imaging have not yet found them.

Cities followed agriculture in all these regions. At first, they varied widely from one place to another. There were low-density cities like those of the Maya, and tightly packed hill towns; instant cities built at the command of an Assyrian, Chinese, or Roman emperor, and others that grew slowly out of collective efforts like the settlements of the Etruscans. Modern cities, with their convergent architectures of steel and concrete, fiber optics and tarmac, are much more similar to each other than were the many seeds from which they have grown.

Today about a quarter of the people of the world live in cities of more than one million people: that share is growing faster than the global population. Growth has not been smooth, but it is now irreversible. The landscapes and biodiversity needed for gathering and hunting are long gone, and could never sustain today’s global population. We cannot turn our backs on farming or on cities. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a human future that is not more urban than ours, unless it’s a dystopian world founded on some species-wide catastrophe, like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs. Is such a colossal cull plausible? Even a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, global deaths add up to less than 0.4 percent of the world’s population. Could anything less than an asteroid strike or a super volcano explosion derail our urban journey now?

These doomsday scenarios aside, an increasingly urban future seems assured. But there is no need to be alarmed by it. One reason not to consign cities to the trash can of some of our species’ worst ideas is that we have turned out to be very well adapted to live in them. Human beings move easily in cities’ complex three-dimensional topography. We are adept at building social groups with strangers as well as kith and kin, we are tolerant of the new (and often nutritionally impoverished) diets that cities impose on their inhabitants, and we combine a sense of local territory (our homes, our neighborhoods) with a capacity for exploring and mapping new spaces that is far superior to that of our nearest animal relatives. We might have been born to live in cities.

We were not, of course, designed for city life. Evolution is the opposite of movement by design—it’s a lurching blindly into the future, through one happy accident after another (or at least, by following paths that are less disastrous than the alternatives). Our species has been around for some 300 million years, and we owe most of our city-friendly features to evolutionary processes that go back even further. For instance, our sociality, linked to the development of our frontal cortex, is pure primate. Our dietary flexibility probably developed in environments where it was never certain exactly which foods would be available. All this added up to an awesome potential for living in cities. We are not the only species with this potential. Mice, rats, bats, and house sparrows also do pretty well in concrete jungles. The difference is, we build cities. They have colonized them.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson pointed out, in The Social Conquest of Earth , that other species too have taken advantage of the chance to live in dense communities. Some (but not all) bees and wasps, coral polyps and termites, and even naked mole rats have come to live what Wilson called eusocial lives, in which social cooperation becomes central. These species are not closely related—not to each other, and not to us—but they have one crucial thing in common. They all make something like a nest. Getting the most out of a social existence, argues Wilson, required cohabitation. Big brains need crowds.

Cities are our nests, so natural to the human animal that we find it difficult to imagine how we ever got on without them. How did we look after our big-brained but slow-developing children when we had no homes, nor enough neighbors or grandparents to care for the kids when we went foraging? How did our astonishing capacity to make tools and artifacts operate when we were so often on the move? If we wanted to develop technologies that were not all small, light, and easy to carry) we had to have a base. Camps and temporary homes must have done some service, and villages were good nests for a while, but only cities have made it possible for human societies to specialize, so everyone lived near a smith or a doctor or a priest, and we could make the most out of our talent for cooperation.

Cities are a new experiment, in evolutionary terms. Probably in the first thousand years or so there were many failures; archaeologists are beginning to map more clearly the urban civilizations that collapsed like so many houses of cards. But we got better at it. Most ancient cities were small just because it was so difficult to provision large ones in time of crisis. The first city builders often concentrated their energy on the house of gods and kings, and on defensive walls. Later generations turned their attention to water supply and drainage, and to constructing roads and canals, granaries and reservoirs. Fire and earthquakes ravaged many ancient cities until architects learned to build in stone and brick, to plan cities for safety, to build resilient structures.

Some of those cities turned out to be so resilient they are still with us today. Athens is maybe 3,500 years old; Rome and Istanbul, nearly 3,000 years old. Even medieval capitals such as Cairo and Tunis are close by ancient predecessors in Memphis and Carthage. Once we found good places to nest, we often stayed.

Modern cities are far more elaborate of course. Few ancient cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Today there are more than 30 cities of more than 10 million. We have learned to pack our nests more densely, piling our homes high. Even more important have been improvements in our cities’ nervous and circulatory systems (electricity, gas, the internet)—the channels by which food and water enter the nest, and waste is removed from it. The modern megacity depends on fast transportation that allows citizens to live far from where they work. These technologies are different from those employed in Tenochtitlan, Alexandria and Baghdad, but the principles are the same.

For the last few thousand years, our societies have mostly been ruled from cities, and our key infrastructures have been designed for urban populations—a state of affairs that holds great promise for humanity and the natural world. Done properly, city life is the most environmentally friendly way to live. Waste disposal, sanitation and recycling is easier to organize in cities than in the countryside. Our generation will see the end of private cars powered by fossil fuels. Already many city dwellers use public transport for most of their travel needs. Electric cars and buses are city friendly as well as environmentally friendly.

Romantics have been calling for us to go back to nature ever since the Industrial Revolution began. But the sums don’t add up. There is not enough “nature” out there to support us all. The kinds of lives we want now—high tech, highly connected, materially rich—work better in cities. And it is better for the planet that we don’t try and live this way in what wilderness is left.

We have not arrived at the city of the future yet, but it’s early days. Each generation our nests get better and better. Cities will continue to be better connected, greener and healthier, and that is all good news. So, city life: not one of our worst ideas, then, after all.

Send A Letter To the Editors

Please tell us your thoughts. Include your name and daytime phone number, and a link to the article you’re responding to. We may edit your letter for length and clarity and publish it on our site.

(Optional) Attach an image to your letter. Jpeg, PNG or GIF accepted, 1MB maximum.

By continuing to use our website, you agree to our privacy and cookie policy . Zócalo wants to hear from you. Please take our survey !-->

Get More Zócalo

No paywall. No ads. No partisan hacks. Ideas journalism with a head and a heart.

These six utopian cities of the future will help you re-imagine life on Earth

Lecturer in Environmental Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Mahidol University

Disclosure statement

Alan Marshall is the coordinator of the Ecotopia 2121 project.

View all partners

Utopia , a book by English statesman, lawyer and clergyman Thomas More (1487-1535), turns 500 years old this month.

A fictional rendering of social philosophy, the book describes an exemplary society on an imaginary island in an unknown place faraway across the seas.

Coined by More from the Greek ou-topos , meaning no place, or nowhere, the word utopia has become adopted in the English language to mean a place where everything is ideal or perfect.

In celebrating Utopia’s 500th birthday, the Ecotopia 2121 project , of which I am the coordinator, is harnessing Thomas More’s spirit to predict the futures of 100 real cities around the world – if they somehow managed to become super eco-friendly.

Of course, modern utopias need to be eco-friendly to overcome the global environmental crisis. Given that cities may be home to 80% of humanity by the end of the century , they can only be sustainable if environmentalism is one of their core features.

The cities of Ecotopia 2121 are presented in the form of “scenario art”, which involves a review of both global and local environmental challenges as well as their unique histories and cultures. This allows for a diversity of future scenarios rather than one common vision of the “future city”.

What you will see below are a series of artworks, but this is not an art project. We use art as a means of analysis and communication.

With that in mind, here are six ecotopian cities of my own creation that emerged from the project, one from each inhabited continent.

Accra, the capital of Ghana , is exposed to disastrous floods every year. This has been made worse by climate change, as well as unregulated construction and dumping in and around its waterways .

In our imagined future, locals seek to procure housing above the floodline, by building low-cost tree cabins in the nearby forest.

Ghana has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world , but by 2121, the forest has become a home for some of its citizens.

Accra’s new residents would protect the forest ecosystem from those who would destroy it, such as the logging, mining and oil companies.

London 2121

In the summer of 2121, during an economic downturn, 100,000 pensioners take to the streets of London, the British capital , to protest cuts in pensions and education, shutting down the entire city.

They bring along their grandchildren to give them something interesting to do as they mind them. By summer’s end, the protesters despair at the government’s poor response, so they take matters into their own hands, staging a permanent occupation.

The pensioners convert some 20km² of London into a large eco-village, transforming unoccupied offices into homes, sowing garden lots on street corners, and setting up eco-businesses to trade products and services.

In the process, all the children get free education from their experienced elders in these various green arts and crafts.

Los Angeles 2121

The southern Californian city of Los Angeles once had a great network of tramways, but this was systematically bought up and then closed down by a group of conspiring auto-manufacturing companies .

As the world’s oil is depleted by the end of this century, cars will become useless and trams could make a comeback in Los Angeles. The unused freeways could then be redeveloped into vegetated greenways. Such greenways are suited for pedestrians and cyclists, but they could also act as ecological corridors, connecting populations of wild plants and animals around the city that would otherwise be isolated.

Retired cars could then serve as part of the fabric of high-density buildings, creating an architectural style whereby people live and work in smaller structures and within tighter-knit communities. This would mean cities such as Los Angeles would not need to sprawl further into the countryside and wild lands.

Rēkohu 2121

Known in English as the Chatham Islands, Rēkohu is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean , 680km southeast of New Zealand. It’s the ancestral home of the pacifist Moriori people , who came to wear the feathers of the native albatross in their hair to symbolise peace during the 500 years they lived on the archipelago.

In the 19th century, British sealers and Maori warriors from New Zealand discovered the islands. The sealers decimated the colonies of the animals and introduced devastating diseases to which the Moriori had no immunity. Then the Maori staged a violent takeover of the islands , slaughtering or enslaving the remaining Moriori.

The Moriori refused to give up their pacifist ideals to fight against the invaders. While this history suggests pacifism is only going to get you killed or enslaved, the Moriori who survive today believe otherwise. They maintain that their pacifism meant that they lived in a peaceful society for five centuries.

By 2121, their small capital city on the lagoon is home to a peace school that expounds the virtues of pacifism to the rest of the world.

Salto del Guairá 2121

The Guairá Falls along the border of Paraguay and Brazil were once a natural wonder. The cacophonous roar of their seven columns could be heard many kilometres away and, for many years, the falls were a major attraction. They were also the economic lifeblood of the nearby Paraguayan city of Salto del Guairá , which thrived on tourism.

In 1982, however, the Brazilian military government blew away the rocks over which the water fell, to create a reservoir for a dam. Many Paraguayans mourned the passing of their much-loved falls.

By 2121, though, both the falls and the city have re-emerged in splendid style. The dam has collapsed through neglect and local people have regained control of their land. They set about rehabilitating the falls as best they can, turning their home into a scenic eco-city that attracts tourists once again.

After a nuclear meltdown just out of town, a vast radioactive cloud sweeps over future Tokyo. Everyone must be evacuated. A few hardy “nuclear families” tough it out in “moonbase” homes, which are impervious to radiation.

Everything these families eat and drink must be produced and recycled within these homes. When they step outside, they must don protective clothing or “moonsuits”.

But because Tokyo is suddenly depopulated, it’s not nearly as noisy and stressful as before. If “hell is other people” , as French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre suggested, then Tokyo 2121 is utopia.

Wildlife also rebounds, albeit in a mutated manner.

Why Ecotopia 2121?

These six scenarios are but a small sample of the 100 that were produced within the Ecotopia 2121 project . Some readers will be delighted and others confused by the method of the project and its results.

Part of the point of utopianism is to be provocative. If you like your future riddled with self-driving cars and the magic of nuclear energy, then maybe these scenarios are not for you. And you’re likely to dismiss them as fantasy anyway.

But to study utopias – and formulate alternative scenarios to how we now live on this planet – is not an escape into fantasy. It is an active response to the many technological fantasies cast about with extravagance and excess into our lives right now.

These fantasies bind us to an unsustainable and unlivable future. If Ecotopia 2121 is but a collection of fantasies, at least they would do less harm to the planet we live on.

• Climate change
• Deforestation
• Nuclear accidents
• Urban ecology
• Environmental degradation
• Global perspectives

Research Fellow

Senior Research Fellow - Women's Health Services

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer - Marketing

Assistant Editor - 1 year cadetship

Executive Dean, Faculty of Health

• GREAT ENERGY CHALLENGE

Planning the Cities of the Future

SPONSOR POST

Cities help define our global civilisation. For hundreds of years, they have been the hubs around which we organise ourselves politically, commercially and culturally.

But the centuries-old process by which those cities have developed is far from over. Ancient metropolises like Hanoi, Osaka and Beijing continue to expand, while new cities seem to be founded almost every week.

That relentless growth has important implications – and is something a new Shell report says we cannot afford to be complacent about.

The challenge is huge. The United Nations projects that the world’s population will grow from roughly seven billion today to nine billion by the middle of the century – the equivalent of 1.4 million people every week.   At the same time, the number of people living in cities is expected to rise from 3.6 billion in 2010 to 6.3 billion in 2050 – with the greatest increase expected in China, India, the USA and sub-Saharan Africa. Of China’s largest 130 cities, meanwhile, more than half are still in the early stages of development.

Why does urbanisation matter? Because well-designed and managed cities can act as powerful engines for economic development and prosperity – and help to nurture innovation and collaboration. But cities that develop poorly affect quality of life, have negative environmental impacts including high greenhouse gas emissions, and can be the source of social and political strife. Crucially, bad urban planning also puts pressure on essential resources like energy, water and food. According to analysis by the United Nations and Shell, demand for all three is already expected to rise by between 40 and 50% by 2030.

For Hungry Minds

That’s why, as municipal leaders gather in Singapore for the World Cities Summit, we must take seriously the challenge posed by accelerating urbanisation.

The Shell Scenarios team has a strong reputation for developing fresh insights into global problems. Their latest report New Lenses on Future Cities , published this week in partnership with the Singaporean government’s Centre for Liveable Cities, identifies a number of areas for action.

You May Also Like

What made Oxford's medieval students so murderous?

MLK and Malcolm X only met once. Here’s the story behind an iconic image.

Which cities will still be livable in a world altered by climate change?

The first is urban planning which focuses on the efficient use of resources. The design and layout of a city has a powerful impact on its resource needs. Compact, more densely populated cities like Hong Kong use significantly less energy per person than sprawling cities like Los Angeles. Why? For example, because people live closer to where they shop, work and play – and therefore use less energy to get around. When those compact cities are served by reliable, cleaner transport networks, energy use is reduced even further.

But more compact, better integrated urban planning is just the start of it. There are a host of other things we can do to make our cities more sustainable and ‘liveable’.

We can encourage the use of smaller cars powered by electricity or hydrogen fuel cells, as well as trucks fuelled by liquefied natural gas; cleaner vehicles which are ideally suited to life in compact, more integrated cities and a perfect complement to advanced transport systems. These will take time to reach mass scale, but are already becoming a familiar sight in some cities. In the meantime, cleaner-burning fuels like gas-to-liquids diesel can improve air quality – a major health consideration in urban settings. The use of global positioning technologies to monitor freight transport in and around cities can help managers to task vehicles as efficiently as possible – ensuring that no journey is wasted or duplicated. Integrating water, sewerage, waste and power systems more effectively would allow the recycling of the water and energy they consume. And switching coal-fired power stations to cleaner-burning gas would reduce carbon emissions and improve the quality of our cities’ air.

Another essential aspect is effective leadership. Whether that leadership comes at the national, regional or city level, it needs to be forward-looking, transparent, flexible and informed by a clearly expressed vision. Our cities also need leaders who are good at implementation – at ‘getting things done’ – and who are capable of building the kind of collaborative, cross-sector partnerships which make it possible to take the steps needed.

Truly sustainabIe urban development is not easy. But it can be done. Fifty years ago, Singapore was very different from the city we know today. A quarter of the population of 1.6 million lived below the poverty line, with hundreds of thousands living in slums and squatter camps where public hygiene was poor and diseases like malaria and tuberculosis endemic. But thanks to a decades-long programme of pro-active urban development – including the construction of Singapore Changi airport, the Mass Rapid Transit subway system, and an island-wide system of expressways – the city’s prospects have been transformed. With limited land and natural resources, Singapore has succeeded in creating an environment in which its economy and its people are thriving.

In seeking to learn from Singapore’s example, no one is suggesting there is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model for urban development. Different cities have different requirements, according to their geography, their finances, their political and institutional capacity and their infrastructure.

But while no two cities, and no two development plans, can or should be the same, there are important principles from which we can learn. Above all, we must understand the benefit of collaboration between government, business and civil society. Because it’s only by working together that cities – homes to billions of people – can be the sustainable hubs we need them to be.

Jeremy Bentham is Head of Shell’s Scenarios team.

Related Topics

• HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION
• PEOPLE AND CULTURE

This legendary gemstone is real—but was it actually cursed?

Are these cities ready to become climate havens?

On Monkey Mountain, this rare species has found an oasis in the big city

How scientists bring ancient faces back to life

These 5 ancient cities once ruled North America—what happened to them?

• Paid Content
• Environment
• Photography
• Perpetual Planet

History & Culture

• History & Culture
• History Magazine
• Mind, Body, Wonder
• World Heritage
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

• About The Digest

Life in 2050: A Look Into Sustainable Cities of the Future

In the next 30 years, cities worldwide will be forced to change in ways never seen before. Sustainability will no longer be an enticing feature; it will be the driving force behind any major city. Sustainable cities of the future will be bigger, greener, and more intertwined with technology. There will be multiple instigators behind this shift. Climate change and advancement in technology are the obvious ones, but they’re unlikely to be the most potent forces. The main reason cities will be forced to become significantly more sustainable will be due to population surges.

The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. This is up from the current figure of 7.8 billion. These numbers have been on a significant rise for some time now, as we’ve seen a jump of nearly 2 billion just in this century alone. This population growth presents troubling implications for the world economy, climate change, resource availability, quality of life, and much more. Humanity will have to adapt. 

Our world is already changing. Planning for this growth has been well underway for some time, and exciting ideas are starting to come to fruition. With the advent of smart technology and a greater emphasis on protecting the environment , we’re closer to the cities of the future than we realize. We’ve already seen surface-level changes: more bike lanes in cities, a renewed emphasis on recycling and clean energy, and further accessibility of public transit. There are some cities across the globe, however, that are much further ahead in regard to their sustainability practices. These cities are providing the rest of us a window into the future. 

Let’s take a look at what sustainable cities of the future could look like in 2050 and which cities are already ahead of the curve:

Cities in 2050

When we think of the year 2050, most of us might think of science-fiction renditions from movies with visions of flying cars and a world driven by gadget-like technology. While we should expect life to be more intertwined with advanced technology, we should also know that the main priority is likely going to be sustainability. The popular buzzwords of today’s world like “smart” technology, “organic” sourcing, and emphasis on “natural” resources will become the predominant themes of living. Likely out of necessity more so than popularity.

Here are some of the most probable features we can expect in the cities of 2050:

Densely-Packed Cities

Out of the population of 9 billion in 2050, 70 percent are expected to live in cities. Cities will be more densely packed than ever before. We can expect a greater emphasis on quality of life and ensuring citizens have accessibility to reduce the negative effects of overcrowding. This enhanced accessibility likely will involve streamlined access to nature, technology, desired services, and practically anything that can improve one’s quality of life. Accessibility will be at an all-time high because it’ll be a necessity to keep cities thriving. With more people, that also means an even greater need for sustainable practices. There will have to be city-wide and even worldwide buy-in to avoid the legitimate threats of pollution, dangerous air quality, resource shortages, and much more.

Jewel Changi Airport, Singapore / Photo by Joe Green

Localized Communities and Urban Hubs

As cities of the future face higher density, there will be a need to create more localized communities. The goal here will be to reverse a practice known as “urban sprawl,” which we see too much of right now. Sprawl refers to growth and development across large land areas, with very low density yet significant environmental implications. For example, suburbs are the most common form of sprawl. These suburban areas can create some economic development, but ultimately it’s hard to argue that it’s enough to overrule the negative environmental and resource impact. If we continue with sprawl, we’ll run out of space, permanently damage the environment, and have severe resource shortages; it’s just not sustainable. Especially in the U.S., we can see with any major city a non-stop outward development in the areas surrounding the cities. 

The way we’ll likely combat this by 2050 is via “urban hubs,” which are localized communities that include mixed-use buildings and developments. Instead of one city center, there might be five or so urban hubs throughout a city. Architects will design buildings for all-in-one use: residences, workspaces, social hangouts, farming, etc. This creates an entire localized community of everything one might need to maximize space and reduce the carbon footprint per person. Modern technology will play a significant role here, making buildings and communities more useful and enjoyable. Within urban hubs, we can also expect more integrated communities between age, class, and much else. National Geographic provides a great breakdown of these urban hubs and much else here .

Building Concept Design for Paris in 2050 / Design from Vincent Callebaut

Redefined Transportation

As you might expect, transportation in 2050 will likely be entirely different. However, it’s probably not going to be what most of us might’ve expected. The big talk nowadays is self-driving cars, but their future might not be all that bright in reality. Even with zero-emission cars, there are potential pitfalls from a sustainability perspective. Vehicles, emission-free or not, cause cities to be far less efficient, make it much harder for other forms of transportation to grow, and use up a good deal of resources. Streets in 2050 will likely be less present and instead will favor more space for pedestrians and alternative transportation. Cars go against the idea of reducing sprawl and make city experience less enjoyable by the area they take up and the impact they have. They’ll probably still be around, but maybe not to the extent that we’d expect. 

Public transit will become more prevalent and should be safer, more affordable, and highly efficient. High-speed and automated travel likely will be the status quo. In the City of Miami, for example, officials already have plans in place to start developing personal rapid transit vehicles, like the ones seen in the design below. Another interesting element here is the role drones will play. It seems no matter what, they’ll be of value in some significant way, but one idea is the potential for drone transportation and use in public transit by 2050. 

Rendering provided by Ultra Global Ltd.

Smart Cities 

Technology in 2050 will need to first and foremost aid sustainability. The tech sector is already becoming more involved, and we can expect that trend to continue. Cities will be driven by smart technology that’ll make people connected in more ways than before and hopefully boost city-life experience. Efficiency will be vital, and that’s where artificial intelligence and automation come in. They’ll likely be the backbone of the economy and everyday life. 

We’ll have some hoops to jump through first when it comes to artificial intelligence and automation. As we can see even in 2020, this technology has both positive and negative side effects on human life. Hopefully, by 2050, AI and automation will serve solely as a significant benefit to humanity and help us be more efficient, have greater work-life balance, and help economies thrive. We can also expect cities of 2050 to include virtual and augmented reality technology as a mainstream feature of society. Such technology will continue to change the way we interact, as we’re all very familiar with here in 2020.

Increased Biodiversity & Revamped Resources 

As mentioned, one of the biggest threats to worldwide population growth is resource shortages. Therefore, we can expect cities of 2050 to be completely self-sufficient—or at least that’s the hope. Cities will have more extraordinary biodiversity by preserving local ecology and making cities “greener.” Therefore, the natural environment will be much more protected, and areas in and around the city can hopefully be core resource production sources. It also means more creative ways of generating resources, with concepts such as vertical farming , underground farming, and even rooftop farming. 

Some vertical farming concepts are already in the works. While there is still a ways to go, more advancements in technology will allow such to be possible in the future. We will need much more protection of natural environments both in and around cities. Cities will need to be self-sufficient to meet the increasing demands of population growth. This applies not only to resource production but to energy sources as well. Cities will have to, at the very least, create as much energy as they use. Sustainable cities of the future will redefine the phrase “concrete jungle,” becoming more of a literal expression than a symbolic one.

An example of vertical farming practices

What’s Happening Right Now?

Though the features outlined above might seem far-out, some of these ideas are already underway in cities across the globe. Several cities are worth paying particular attention to now and in the coming years, as they’re functioning as the sort of trial runs for developing sustainable cities of the future. There are two cities I specifically wanted to highlight because they show two different but equally successful approaches to creating a sustainable modern city. With that said, let’s take a look at what’s happening in Singapore and Copenhagen. 

Singapore is a truly unique place, serving as both a city and a country, a true city-state. It also has undergone such tremendous change in the last 50 years, perhaps like never before seen. In 1965, the city-state was struggling economically, was heavily polluted, and was far from a desirable place for tourists and investors. Fast forward to 2020, and it’s one of the greenest and most modern cities in the entire world. The city is perhaps the best model for how sustainable cities of the future will look. 

Singapore is a densely packed city but places significant emphasis on quality of life and sustainability. Citizens have proximity and accessibility to all they need, such as schools, entertainment, shops, healthcare, and affordable public transit. Buildings are extensively intertwined with both natural and produced biodiversity under the green initiatives. Overall, the city-state is exceptionally accessible, is mostly self-sufficient, protects and promotes biodiversity, and is the closest city to what I outlined above in the entire world. 

Copenhagen is another world leader in sustainability but offers a different approach than that of Singapore. While Singapore has undergone a complete overhaul in development, Copenhagen has stayed relatively the same but has instead overhauled its sustainability practices. I like to think of Singapore as the desired future of cities, whereas Copenhagen is the more realistic future for cities to model in the coming years.  Copenhagen has revamped its sustainability practices to become one of the world leaders. Take a look at this short clip to see how:

How We Move Forward

Singapore and Copenhagen are beautiful examples of redesigning and refocusing our cities to become more sustainable. But if we’re to get to a point where such cities are common, there are hoops to jump through first. Perhaps the most obvious is the financial impact. These initiatives undertaken by both cities are costly, and it’s ultimately the local citizens that feel the burden. The cost of living in Singapore and Copenhagen is exceptionally high—among the most expensive in the world. Ultimately, sustainability should save money and reduce costs down the road; however, it’s the initial financial burden that poses the biggest drawback for most cities worldwide. 

Another big hurdle, particularly in the U.S., is complete buy-in to sustainability. The only way we’ll ever reach the ideal sustainable cities of the future is by the full support of people. In the 2019 Freethink feature video on Copenhagen, you can see that despite how expensive such measures are, the citizens have entirely bought in, which aided tremendously in advancing the initiatives. 

Despite the challenges cities are facing due to COVID, now could be the best time to start considering sweeping changes. Money and citizen buy-in makes this problematic. But I wonder if cities will ever have an opportunity like right now to start making real adjustments. There’s a lot at play here, and it’s easier said than done. But looking at New York City, for example, it’s possible that rethinking sustainability practices could help propel the city forward.

One way or another, communities worldwide will have to make profound changes to be more sustainable by 2050. Why not start sustainable cities of the future, now?

About the Author/s

Garrett Rutledge

Garrett is a writer at The Digest. He currently lives in Astoria, NY, and loves writing about topics that make readers think. His passions include film, sports, traveling, and culture.

• Garrett Rutledge https://thedigestonline.com/author/grutledge/ 11 Ski Trips Near New Jersey (2023 Guide)
• Garrett Rutledge https://thedigestonline.com/author/grutledge/ Whose Idea Was This Anyway? The Bizarre History Behind Our Favorite Christmas Decor
• Garrett Rutledge https://thedigestonline.com/author/grutledge/ Richie “The Boot” Boiardo: New Jersey Mafioso and Secret Pop-Culture Icon
• Garrett Rutledge https://thedigestonline.com/author/grutledge/ Revisiting New Jersey’s Cannabis Legalization a Year Later

An Inside Look at Sirenetta in Hoboken

10 mystery novels that will blow your mind, related articles, scatterbrainz: nj couple creates app to organize family..., how many miles do semi trucks last, the state of the solar energy industry in..., powerpoint presentation step by step, new jersey devils’ brendan smith hosts first-ever “kancer..., 7 spectacular christmas tree lightings in somerset county, giving back made easy at these nj holiday..., celebrate indigenous heritage month in nj with these..., leveraging social media for community engagement, my backyard at nectar’s: growing awareness of native....

Why not have a national or global student contest to create a new gender-neutral sport / recreation activity that keeps players separate, has not hand or head contact with shared equipment, and can be played during a pandemic? This may help society now and during other pandemics in the future.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Yes, I would like to receive emails from The Digest Online. Sign me up!

• Entertainment
• Restaurant Guide
• Weekly Newsletter

• NONFICTION BOOKS
• BEST NONFICTION 2023
• BEST NONFICTION 2024
• Historical Biographies
• The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies
• Philosophical Biographies
• World War 2
• World History
• American History
• British History
• Chinese History
• Russian History
• Ancient History (up to 500)
• Medieval History (500-1400)
• Military History
• Art History
• Travel Books
• Ancient Philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy
• Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Great Philosophers
• Social & Political Philosophy
• Classical Studies
• New Science Books
• Maths & Statistics
• Popular Science
• Physics Books
• Climate Change Books
• How to Write
• English Grammar & Usage
• Books for Learning Languages
• Linguistics
• Political Ideologies
• Foreign Policy & International Relations
• American Politics
• British Politics
• Religious History Books
• Mental Health
• Neuroscience
• Child Psychology
• Film & Cinema
• Opera & Classical Music
• Behavioural Economics
• Development Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Crisis
• World Economies
• Investing Books
• Artificial Intelligence/AI Books
• Data Science Books
• Sex & Sexuality
• Death & Dying
• Food & Cooking
• Sports, Games & Hobbies
• FICTION BOOKS
• BEST NOVELS 2024
• BEST FICTION 2023
• New Literary Fiction
• World Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Literary Figures
• Classic English Literature
• American Literature
• Comics & Graphic Novels
• Fairy Tales & Mythology
• Historical Fiction
• Crime Novels
• Science Fiction
• Short Stories
• South Africa
• United States
• Arctic & Antarctica
• Afghanistan
• Myanmar (Formerly Burma)
• Netherlands
• Kids Recommend Books for Kids
• High School Teachers Recommendations
• Prizewinning Kids' Books
• Popular Series Books for Kids
• BEST BOOKS FOR KIDS (ALL AGES)
• Ages Baby-2
• Books for Teens and Young Adults
• THE BEST SCIENCE BOOKS FOR KIDS
• BEST KIDS' BOOKS OF 2023
• BEST BOOKS FOR TEENS OF 2023
• Best Audiobooks for Kids
• Environment
• Best Books for Teens of 2023
• Best Kids' Books of 2023
• Political Novels
• New History Books
• New Historical Fiction
• New Biography
• New Memoirs
• New World Literature
• New Economics Books
• New Climate Books
• New Math Books
• New Philosophy Books
• New Psychology Books
• New Physics Books
• THE BEST AUDIOBOOKS
• Actors Read Great Books
• Books Narrated by Their Authors
• Best Audiobook Thrillers
• Best History Audiobooks
• Nobel Literature Prize
• Booker Prize (fiction)
• Baillie Gifford Prize (nonfiction)
• Financial Times (nonfiction)
• Wolfson Prize (history)
• Royal Society (science)
• Pushkin House Prize (Russia)
• Walter Scott Prize (historical fiction)
• Arthur C Clarke Prize (sci fi)
• The Hugos (sci fi & fantasy)
• Audie Awards (audiobooks)

Make Your Own List

Art » Architecture

The best books on future cities, recommended by davina jackson.

Data Cities: How Satellites Are Transforming Architecture And Design by Davina Jackson

We are a city-dwelling species. Our urban existence creates both opportunities and challenges, as the recent pandemic has illustrated. One thing seems clear, however. Understanding the way we interact with our built environment is becoming an increasingly data-driven enterprise, as Davina Jackson argues compellingly in her book, Data Cities . Here, she shares the five books that best explain the technology behind the urban planning of the future.

Interview by Romas Viesulas

City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn by William J. Mitchell

The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture: City, Technology and Society in the Information Age by Federico Soriano, Fernando Porras, José Morales, Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart & Willy Müller

Cities In Civilization by Peter Hall

The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers and the Future of Urban Life by Carlo Ratti & Matthew Claudel

Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design and the Nature of Cities by Nicholas de Monchaux

1 City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn by William J. Mitchell

2 the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture: city, technology and society in the information age by federico soriano, fernando porras, josé morales, manuel gausa, vicente guallart & willy müller, 3 cities in civilization by peter hall, 4 the city of tomorrow: sensors, networks, hackers and the future of urban life by carlo ratti & matthew claudel, 5 local code: 3,659 proposals about data, design and the nature of cities by nicholas de monchaux.

W e live in what has been dubbed the Anthropocene, although the ‘Metropocene’ might be an equally apt moniker, as we are overwhelmingly a city-dwelling species .  Future cities is our topic, and you have focused on creative technological applications in urban contexts, as surveyed in your book, Data Cities . Elsewhere, you’ve coined the term ‘viral internationalism’ to describe the way architectural concepts gain currency around the world. How does one relate to the other?

Data Cities is the culmination of two decades of research I’ve done into the future of urban development after the internet. In the mid-nineties, I was asked to sub-edit an anthology of 39 academic essays that was compiled by Peter Droege, then the urbanism professor at Sydney University but also from MIT, Tokyo and Munich universities. It was a thrill to intensely focus on so many serious texts about the potential impacts of technology on cities. This was in 1995, when we had only just begun using email. The internet was being described as an ‘infobahn’. Very few people knew about the World Wide Web and the term ‘smart cities’ hadn’t been invented.

“ Just as the future for architecture was to model the building virtually on the computer before you actually went on site…so computer modelling would need to be applied to planning and designing cities of the future.”

Separately, as editor of Architecture Australia , the journal of the Institute of Architects, I spent the nineties getting excited about coming digital technologies, talking to international architects who were big on what was then called CAD or CAAD (computer-aided architectural design) and is now called BIM (building information modelling). These systems, driving robotic machines, were obviously going to have massive implications for architects and building in the 21st century. I’m always after the next big story – a newspaper journalist trained to develop a ‘nose for news’ – and as an editor and a trend-spotter writing for design magazines, I thought ‘wow this really is a big movement … but what exactly is the story?’

Meanwhile, I was learning a lot from very advanced architects like the Dean of Architecture and Planning at MIT, an Australian named William J. Mitchell; Bill to his friends and students. His 1990s books City of Bits, E-Topia and Me++ inspired me greatly. Not just because his work was so informative about the cutting edge of architectural research – which MIT is famous for – but also because he had an incredibly luminous way of writing. His prose really carries you forward, and you can’t help getting engaged with the content just because of his stylish wordplay.

I came to know Bill quite well, along with other leading protagonists in America and in Britain. At that time, I just would lap up anything they had to say about the future of computer-aided design. But when I left Architecture Australia in 2000, I decided to look at the future of urban development rather than just architecture because I felt that progressive architects were ahead of technology, but cities offered the real potential for dynamic, networked applications. These applications seemed to be super-effective but invisible: the new information architecture was not about sculpting awesome forms in the traditional concept of architecture. But there was a real gulf between the theory and the practice and the disciplines of architecture and planning. Most planners I knew in Australia seemed not even hostile about post-internet technology potentials, just wilfully ignorant. Gradually I learned that just as the future for architecture was to model the building virtually on the computer before you actually went on site, making your mistakes and improvements in the model, so computer modelling would need to be applied to planning and designing cities of the future.

Are you referring to ‘smart cities’?

In the years around Y2K, the term ‘smart cities’ was not yet in currency. Bill Mitchell didn’t invent the term, but he popularised it in the early 2000s, when American designer Will Wright also released Sim City the computer game. In the mid-to-late 2000s, several global corporations – Cisco, IBM, Siemens and the engineering firm Arup – began to exploit the term ‘smart city’ in order to win massive government contracts for installing broadband cables and new telecoms equipment at suburban to metropolitan scales. They went ruthlessly after a global market worth many trillions. But just installing cables didn’t seem to me to be inherently ‘smart’. It seemed that this was just the first step to enable actors in cities to access what Bill Mitchell called ‘bits’ of information. As a journalist I understood the notion of gathering ‘facts’. But computer scientists were using the word ‘data’, which seemed to have the potential to become most prevalent. Later I discovered an organisation called the International Society for Digital Earth that was essentially a neo-Buckminster Fuller organisation, based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but including remote sensing and geospatial science leaders in Europe, Russia, Japan and even North Korea. This society was determined to promote the idea – from Bucky via Al Gore’s 1992 term ‘Digital Earth’ – that we needed to use sensors and scanners aboard satellites to help monitor and model all the world’s environmental systems. This was not just SimCity but SimPlanet!

Where early Mediterranean cartographers had talked about mapping the world by land and sea exploration, Bucky was the first to imagine mapping the world by observing its behaviours from space; we include in  Data Cities his famous 1927 drawing and quote his 1970s and early 80s ideas of using electronics to help auto-pilot what he called ‘Spaceship Earth’. Al Gore updated his Digital Earth theme during his presidential campaign in the late 1990s.

“I would go further and say that it is as important as the invention of the steam engine and is transforming the world to a similar degree. Satellite technology and the data it mediates is literally at that scale of innovation.”

Since the late noughties, I’ve been promoting to many Digital Earth science boffins the idea of ‘data cities’ being a crucial subset of their goal to observe and visually simulate the world. But I’ve also tried to persuade urbanists – not always successfully – that they have to understand how global Earth observations methods are fundamental to understanding  cities and the ways we inhabit them today.

This is where satellite-mediated data comes in. While meteorological satellites have been around for decades – clarifying tomorrow’s weather on tonight’s TV news – telecommunications satellites are now essential for all our networked devices – ranging from smartphones to drones. Now we have satellites equipped for different types of Earth observation: receiving and beaming all the waves of the electromagnetic spectrum to detect surface temperatures, vegetation states, soil types, and the locations, heights and sizes of landforms, buildings, structures and vehicles. We’ve got scanners filming and sensors pulsing from squillions of aerial, nautical and terrestrial vehicles and fixed structures. All the data they capture flows through satellites in orbit. This is how our world is being surveyed today – and throughout history, architects and planners have always relied on survey data as the basis for designing every new development. From this major revolution in the history of surveying must come an equally major revolution in the history of urban design.

So the satellite is to our generation what effectively the Mercator Projection was to prior generations?

I would go further and say that it is as important as the invention of the steam engine and is transforming the world to a similar degree. Satellite technology and the data it mediates are literally at that scale of innovation.

Before we move on to the other books about future cities you’ve selected, tell us a bit more about ‘viral internationalism’. You coined the phrase originally as a way of describing how architecture develops both aesthetically and within cultures, and how architectural information or ‘bits’ of architectural culture are passed on between people across space and time.

I wrote that article on request by Virginia McLeod, an Australian architect who is the architecture editor for Phaidon. In the early 2000s, she was looking for a writer to represent the southern hemisphere among a group of prominent critics for a new edition of their popular 10 x 10 tome surveying 100 contemporary architects. I had studied a lot of architectural theory for my masters thesis titled @home: Another Revolution in Architecture’s Theory of the House and I’d got an idea that in the internet age, it would be essential for Australian architects to revise their commitment to Kenneth Frampton’s then-pervasive theory of ‘critical regionalism’. Instead of designing buildings as isolated objects related only to the conditions of their site, they needed to understand that occupants of buildings now would be constantly connected around the world.

“My instinct was that after the internet, you simply could not try to resist globalism. Wherever you are based, as an architect or urban planner, you are going to be ‘infected’ by ideas, events and trends. Post-internet culture would be virally transmitted.”

I felt that the internet was going to transform the theory of architecture. The term viral internationalism came spontaneously, and seemed like a logical antidote to Ken Frampton’s famous theory. Ken is a lovely human and great scholar. He was often invited to Australia by his friends and former students to speak on critical regionalism and its importance for Australian architects.

But as I said in my Phaidon essay, his idea seemed fairly Marxist: a call to critically resist the relentless pressures of the global media and capitalism. It seemed that his message to architects, in practical terms, was to avoid mindlessly copying foreign ideas and to instead represent your particular place of building. You could refer to foreign magazines and other influences, but you would have to consciously decide what you believed it was appropriate to emulate.

My instinct was that after the internet, you simply could not try to resist globalism. Wherever you are based, as an architect or urban planner, you are going to be ‘infected’ by ideas, events and trends. Post-internet culture would be virally transmitted.

I’m reminded of an article by social scientist Richard Florida in The Atlantic . He said the world is spiky. The world is not flat. A current argument at that time was that globalisation is flattening the world, and Florida pointed out that if you look at it on different metrics – innovation, technological advances, even economic development – it’s actually very spiky. The spikes coincide with cities or conurbations. Talking about future cities, this seems to me to have important implications for the way that we look at global problems and their concentration in centres of population.

Metapolis seems like a good future cities book to discuss next. Here’s a book that seems to put a new spin on the concept of an urban dictionary. 

It’s a thumping tome with a sexy, tactile, red vinyl cover. When I first came across it, I was flabbergasted by its exciting content. At a time when I was straining my brain to understand vastly diverse angles about the future of urbanism, this dictionary came to my aid. As a writer I found it especially valuable to clarify the origins and meanings of many words that were emerging in progressive discussions and publications, but which were novel to me.

Here are some sample words from the dictionary that I wanted to understand: anarchitecture; impermanences; a-couplings; ad-herence and ecomonumentality. Although the authors are Catalan architects, the English translation was exemplary. Although these words are not viable in writing for a broad audience, it was exciting to read the concepts, and for a while this book was my bible.

“Really cities are as much about flows – of information and behaviours, and about intangible ‘stuff’, not only tangible ‘things’.”

The authors of  Metapolis were the founders of one of the world’s most innovative architecture schools, The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. They lead the continuation of Barcelona as one of the world’s most fertile cities for progressive applications of urban theory. They aligned with a publisher in Barcelona called Ramon Prat who runs a company called ACTAR. Jointly, they produced an extraordinary series of ‘boogazines’, that were rich in theoretical articles, student design concepts and urban research case studies.

What strikes me is that a lot of this vocabulary seems to reflect the physical forms that architecture has been taking in recent decades. There are architectural manifestations being built that defy traditional building technologies and engineering practices that often follow organic strictures. A prominent example is the late  Zaha Hadid ’s practice. The very shapes of these buildings seem to require a new vocabulary to describe it. So it seems fitting that there should be a volume like this to orient us in this new architectural culture that’s been developing, spurred on by technological innovation.

The city is certainly a dynamic, not static entity. One of the future cities books in your selection that captures that dynamism very well is the history book, Cities in Civilization , another thumping tome. 

This is the masterwork written by the world’s greatest 20th century scholar and historian of cities. Peter Hall was a professor working mainly at University College London, but he travelled widely to learn and lecture on how cities developed and operated. This book details how cities of the past were innovative for their day, and how technology changed them. If anyone wants to understand cities of the future, our topic here, it’s critical to understand what future cities from the past can teach us.

Hall writes about some of the cities that were cradles of European civilisation, but he extends his study to major cities of the Industrial Revolution such as Manchester and Detroit, and then more recently to technological centres like Palo Alto, which heralded the information age. What cities today do you think will earn the title ‘City of the Future’, say, looking back from a vantage point in a hundred years?

The ‘City of the Future’ is an evolving concept that’s predicated on evidence-based design and planning and a policy and regulation methodology that depends increasingly on data visualisation. Look at how everyone has become fascinated by the colourful and often dynamic graphs of statistics revealing the local and global progress of the coronavirus pandemic. Without those data visualisations showing the need to ‘flatten the curve’, governments simply couldn’t have persuaded so many of their citizens to stay at home.

“The ‘City of the Future’ is an evolving concept that’s predicated on evidence-based design and planning and a policy and regulation methodology that depends increasingly on data visualisation.”

Today’s cities leading the data revolution seem to include Barcelona and London; and American centres of innovation like San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Asia there are Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul. And in the Middle East, there have been considerable advances made in Dubai, but usually by imported architects, and now its seems Saudi wants to be the next heroic node of imported architecture. European geodata research is underpinned by Switzerland’s ETH university system and CERN; the European Space Agency and joint research centres in Italy, and various spatial surveying and planning research centres in the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, looms large in your selection of books about future cities.

City of Bits is the book that really kicked off my inquiries towards data cities, way back in 1995. It was one of the most important of a group of publications that showed the internet was going to rock our world. Bill Gates wrote one, and another notable book was the seminal Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, another professor at MIT Media Lab. I chose Mitchell’s book for its greater focus on the urban, and because it is beautifully written.

Another favourite book by MIT professors is  The City of Tomorrow by Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel. Carlo was a student of Bill’s at MIT: They set up the Smart Cities Lab together and worked on a project called the City Car, a technologically advanced vehicle that could be parked in a tight chain, like supermarket trolleys, and could be rented, like today’s car-sharing services. After Mitchell died in the early 2000s, Carlo carried on pioneering sensor-enabled urban research experiments as head of what he called the SENSEable City Lab. I discovered his genius at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006, where the Italian pavilion was filled with big, transparent screens showing dynamic maps of pedestrians and buses moving around ‘Real-Time Rome’. These floating, frameless, holographic screens were a gob-smacking sight in Venice – years before we saw them in Avatar – and still are fantastic visualisations of data from smartphones. Carlo’s videos culminated with these amazing crescendos representing crowds at the stadium, sending messages on their phones at the height of a soccer match or a Madonna concert.

Carlo’s Real-Time Rome exhibit really galvanised my focus on researching and promoting data cities. I later organized for Carlo to come to a Metropolis (major city governments) conference in Sydney, where he gave an impromptu speech at the launch of a networking project that I had catalysed called D_City. This idea evolved into a report called  D_City: Digital Earth | Virtual Nations | Data Cities  that was sponsored by the Group on Earth Observations in Geneva in 2013.

Get the weekly Five Books newsletter

Carlo is a great inventor and many other things but seems not a great writer, which I guess is why he collaborates on books with Matthew Claudel, the head of Civic Innovation at MIT. In The City of Tomorrow , they present some profound advances achieved in the first 10 years of what I call the data city movement. Carlo coined the term SENSEable City – alluding to human and artificial sensing. He suggests we don’t start with technology, that we start with the human needs, experiences and desires, and then use sensor devices to help deliver solutions. One of his latest projects is fitting sensors in city sewers to detect traces of drugs and other substances in human effluence. Government agencies can use the sensor data to detect where there is alarming use of prohibited substances or other indicators of health problems – including warning signs of a pandemic.

On the face of it, one might think ‘well, you know at the end of the day, we’re still talking about physical human beings that was all fine and well, but people still need to be fed, the trash still needs to be collected. … who has time for technology when there are more basic needs to be met.’ This book shows very clearly that data-harvesting can improve even these very basic features of city life, perhaps inordinately.

Speaking of research, the final book in your selection, Local Code , has a very innovative and intriguing structure. It comes across almost more like a research proposal than a conventional book, including a range of hypothetical case studies relating to possible projects in San Francisco, LA, Venice and New York, which are sandwiched between historic essays by three important figures. I was delighted to find conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark in these pages, and surprised to discover that in his work he was thinking in almost proto-digital terms. 

The author Nicholas de Monchaux is the son of Jean-Pierre (known widely as John) de Monchaux, the dean of architecture and planning at MIT before Bill Mitchell. The younger de Monchaux is also something of a prodigy, and while he’s certainly benefited from his upbringing in a prominent architecture family, he is a formidable planning theorist and now the professor of architecture and urbanism at Berkeley. This book is impressively illustrated with many speculative urban design projects by his students. These are visually stimulating and glamorous.

However the book’s best content in my view is three key essays by Nicholas which give unprecedented biographical histories of Gordon Matta-Clark, Jane Jacobs and a data cities pioneer from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, named Howard Fisher . At Harvard, Fisher developed a data-mapping system called SYMAP which relied on typing Os and Xs to visualise geographical terrain. This system was revolutionary in its day – too far ahead of its time. But Nicholas now has clarified how that system emerged from Harvard via one of Fisher’s graduate students, Jack Dangermond, to become ubiquitous in today’s environmental mapping industry. Dangermond organised to take Fisher’s SYMAP methods out of Harvard and into his own entity called the Environmental Science and Research Institute, ESRI. Under Dangermond, Esri  has grown into a global multi-billion dollar software company, the world’s leading GIS (geographic information systems) provider. Today, anyone in urban planning who needs to map anything – including for example the spread of the coronavirus epidemic – needs to use Esri maps and often its data to produce their visualisations. It’s more or less a global monopoly that originated with Howard Fisher. He made not a penny from his invention – but that’s how sometimes these things happen.

Support Five Books

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .

Esri as a private company is now encouraging universities around the world to develop ‘geodesign’ programs that are dependent on using Esri tools. Geodesign is data-mapping, but it extends well beyond cities to include natural regions, resources and realms like forests and lakes, and even to the scale of the whole ‘Digital Earth’.

Mayors of many cities in this current pandemic crisis seem to be stepping into what looks like a leadership vacuum. Some might go so far as to say that municipal government seems to be having something of a golden age. There are initiatives like the National League of Cities in the US, the League of Mayors globally and the C-40 network, which is all about how cities can deal with climate change .

Initiatives like these will need to focus on data mapping to understand how 21st century cities actually work. This is integral to the vision of the Digital Earth movement now. Anyone with a serious scientific interest could refer to our ‘Digital City’ chapter in the new Springer open-access science anthology,  Manual of Digital Earth .

I love the way the title echoes the title of Buckminster Fuller’s foundational text,  An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth .

The Digital Earth movement really coalesced around Bucky’s 1928 diagram of the world, a fabulous image of the Earth pulsating with electronic waves. It presages a digital understanding of the world well before the first electronic computer was even a notion, well before the Enigma coding machine. We are all on Spaceship Earth together, needing incredibly powerful new tools and systems to help pilot our planet more safely.

May 11, 2020

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Davina Jackson

Dr Davina Jackson is an international writer and promoter of creative applications of post-internet technology for urban development. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society of Arts, an honorary academic with the University of Kent and an honorary life member of the International Society for Digital Earth. She was a founder of Sydney’s annual Vivid light festival and lead editor of the first manifesto report on the Geneva-led Global Earth Observation System of Systems project. Her latest book is Data Cities: How satellites are transforming architecture and design  (Lund Humphries, 2018).

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

This site has an archive of more than one thousand seven hundred interviews, or eight thousand book recommendations. We publish at least two new interviews per week.

Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases.

© Five Books 2024

• Contributors : About the Site

Newgeography.com

• Urban Issues
• Small Cities
• Demographics
• © 2024 New Geography
• CONTRIBUTORS :
• PRIVACY POLICY
• Stay up to date:

Essays About Cities: Top 7 Examples and 10 Prompts

If you’re writing an essay about cities, discover helpful examples of essays about cities and prompts in our guide to help stir your creative thoughts. 

Cities are the most stable social organization that has stood the test of time. A place achieves city status not only because of the sheer size of its population but also because of its territories, economic development, and political influence. Creating sustainable and resilient cities has attracted significant attention from academics, policymakers, civic groups, and the private sector over the years. This interest is spurred by pressing threats to the livability of cities, such as flooding, pollution, urban migration, and congestion. Whether you live in a city or dream of city life, writing an essay on this topic is a fantastic way to convey your thoughts on this topic. 

Check out below some amazing essay examples and prompts to help you create an insightful essay.

7 Best Essay Examples

1.  cities are scrambling to prevent flooding by casey crownhart, 2. putrajaya: the capital city you’ve never heard of by ronan o’connell, 3. japan’s hidden jewels: the abandoned island of hashima by hannah bergin, 4. planning to preserve — keeping heritage relevant in cities by marcus ng, 5. building the city of the future — at a $41 trillion price tag by aneri pattani, 6. 8 highlights from enabling masterplan 2030 to empower persons with disabilities by shermaine ang and goh yan han, 7. how cities are using technology to solve their trash problems by nell lewis, 10 writing prompts for essays about cities, 1. all about your city, 2. anti-congestion policies in your city, 3. fixing flood-prone cities, 4. green cities, 5. city vs. countryside, 6. cities in the metaverse, 7. what are megacities, 8. criminality in cities, 9. bucket list cities, 10. agriculture in cities.

“In many cases, their existing systems are aging and built for the climate of the past. And even upgrades can do only so much to mitigate the intense flooding that’s becoming more common, leaving cities to come up with other solutions.”

In this article, Crownhart delves into how states across the United States are experiencing unprecedented flood levels that are drowning out entire towns. While a total upgrade is urgent, it is also insanely costly.

“Building Putrajaya from scratch also afforded generous opportunities for innovation. Mahathir’s goal was to make Putrajaya Malaysia’s most eco-friendly urban centre and its most modern.”

In this Essay, O’Connell describes some capital cities we may not know of. Focusing on Malaysia, we learn that Putrajaya aimed to serve as Malaysia’s next capital during the worsening congestion in Kuala Lumpur. Now, Malaysia’s administrative and judicial capital offers the lure and peace of a sleeping eco-haven.

“A coal-mining site during the Meiji Restoration, Hashima has since been completely abandoned. All that remains of the once thriving site, are the crumbling bones of deserted buildings.”

Looking at some economic issues within cities, Bergin describes the coal mining industry within Hashima. Hashima was once a host to a thriving coal mining industry, but people abruptly left once the mine reserves had depleted. Now, the remnants of its glorious industrial past can only be glimpsed through Google images. 

“Preserving historical buildings and neighbourhoods helps to maintain a city’s distinctive character and engender a sense of belonging. The social fabric is also strengthened when planners work with local communities to create new and relevant uses for old spaces such as industrial neighbourhoods.”

The essay visits the culture and heritage preservation policies and efforts across various cultural cities, both old and emerging. Marcus Ng describes the importance of preserving significant buildings that enhance a city’s unique history and culture.

“As cities invest in air-quality sensors, solar-powered trash compactors, self-healing power grids and more, the opportunities for private industry are huge. Experts say there is just one problem: It’s virtually impossible to measure the return on investment for many leading-edge technologies first being put to use by the public sector.”

In the following decades, cities could be shelling out $41 trillion to build their smart capabilities to take living standards to the next level. However, a looming problem remains, and that is estimating a return from this investment. Pattani discusses the importance of building smart and sustainable cities.

“A new task force will work on designing alternative employment models such as micro jobs – temporary, task-type jobs – which can support more people to work, and increase the number of organisations that commit to being inclusive through the Enabling Mark and Enabling Employment Pledge.”

Among the top countries known for its friendliness to persons with disabilities (PWD), Singapore continues to roll out new efforts to make PWDs more at home in this Lion City. This intriguing essay shows how to progress with essential socio-economic growth within a city.

“As urban populations continue to grow, some cities are struggling to cope. Many are turning to new technologies for cost-effective solutions to clean up waste.”

From AI, automation, and converting waste to energy, cities are drawing up innovative measures to address their growing waste problem. In this essay, Lewis describes how technology can be used to tackle recycling issues in condensed and highly populated cities.

Read on to see writing prompts and ideas to help you get started:

This essay could serve as an ultimate city guide. First, write about the history of the city you line in, including the figures that envisioned and helped make the city blueprint a reality. Then, talk about its economic development and architectural changes over the decades. Finally, recommend the best landmarks tourists should visit.

Traffic congestion can easily rob a city of billions of dollars a year. But it remains the biggest challenge, especially for business hubs. For this essay, share how immense the congestion problem is in your city. Then, lay down the solutions being implemented by your city government or proposed by concerned communities.

With the rapid pace of global warming, flooding in cities is now a significant concern that demands urgent action. Look into model cities and highlight out-of-the-box strategies they are undertaking. Some examples could be Tokyo’s $2 billion floodwater cathedral and the Busan floating pontoon city project. You may also share about your own city’s flood mitigation program. 

Beyond improving the environment and reducing pollution, green cities also promote better health and wellness for their citizens. List down your city government’s efforts to shift toward a greener city. If you want to go the extra mile, interview city officials and city planners. You could also talk to groups advocating for green cities to know more deeply about the obstacles preventing your city from going greener and emerging policy proposals. 

The countryside is always a good place to escape the city’s bustle and hustle from time to time. But if you were to choose a permanent residence, would you go to the big city or the countryside? Make a pick by weighing the pros and cons of moving to the countryside or staying in the city. You may also mull over the push in many countries to bring commerce and jobs to the countryside. Answer how this could benefit provinces, promote countryside living and help decongest cities. 

Many companies are investing billions of dollars to become the first movers in the virtual world, where they aspire to build their cities and empire. This is compelling even government agencies to venture into this exciting new world. But what exactly are the opportunities and threats awaiting netizens in the metaverse? Identify the advantages and disadvantages of metaverse-based cities regarding economic opportunities and social development on an individual, community, and national level. 

Megacities are extraordinarily large cities with millions of residents and diverse cultures. Megacities promise greater connectivity, bigger and more reliable infrastructure, and greater integration of technology in everyday life. In your essay, discuss the global upward trend in the attraction of megacities as a center for business and prosperity. 

In your essay, you can try to answer whether community size affects the criminality rate. First, research by gathering available reports that analyze and compare criminality rates in urban and rural areas. Then, cite the primary factors that make cities more prone to criminal incidents. You could also search for the most violent cities in the world and find out factors that drove criminality in these cities to record highs. 

In this light essay, write about the city you’ve been dreaming of travelling to. Then, explain why this is your top pick. Your reasons may relate to the history of the place, grand aesthetic architecture, or even something more personal. To conclude your essay, list down the must-visit landmarks and must-do activities once you get the chance to visit this city.

Urban agriculture is one way to ensure food sufficiency and promote city livelihoods. First, write about model cities aggressively promoting agricultural farming, cultivation, and processing within city centers. Then, talk about your city’s urban gardening initiatives and how this has helped enhance food security. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checker . If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips !

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

View all posts

Neom: The City of the Future

Neom is the newest attempt in combining technology , entrepreneurship, science, and innovation to create a city with limitless opportunities . The centrepiece for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan to expand on their country’s unique strengths and capabilities, Neom is a 500 billion dollar projected project meant to grow the country’s economy and create a vibrant society. Announced by Crown Prince and Chairman of the Council of Economic and Developmental Affairs Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud in 2017, Neom has plans that focus on five different fundamentals, sustainability, community, technological, nature, and livability. With phase one of the project already nearing completion, this project will have a massive impact on the region and will pioneer the future of city-designing.

Neom, meaning “new future” in Arabic certainly fits the name. Projected to cover 10,230 square miles on the Red Sea in northwest Saudi Arabia , this large-scale project plans to create an environment where humans and technology can interact and reinvent the future in aspects such as energy, mobility, manufacturing, agritech, health, and livability. The designated location offers diverse terrain, with long beaches, valleys, deserts, and mountain views all with an average 10 Celsius cooler climate than the rest of the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council making it ideal for future residents. One of Neom’s fundamentals is mobility for tourists and residents . The project plans to use its strategic location to become the centre of world trade and be accessible to 70% of the world’s population in under eight hours through its recently constructed Neom Airport. With already 10% of the world’s trade flowing through the Red Sea, other major hubs like London will be five hours away, Dubai and Cairo two, and Zurich five and a half using the new airport. Neom will also be constructing high-speed transit and on-demand shared mobility using already-developed digital infrastructure that will allow all neighbourhoods in the city to be connected and accessible. This, along with carefully designed street plans that prioritize walking and cycling will allow mobility throughout the entire city for residents and eliminate personal driving as a priority. The new connections between neighbourhoods and whole countries will allow the integration of new cultures within the city and spread inclusivity and progress. 

Another key goal of Neom is for it to become a lead example of sustainable city practices. It is projected that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in an urban area by 2050. To combat our current climate crisis Neom aims to reinvent the future of wind and water energy.

As previously mentioned, Neom’s climate is 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the GCC. This is due to the strong breezes coming in from the Red Sea. The city aims to use these breezes as a competitively priced renewable energy source and develop a smart transmission and distribution network with the latest and most advanced technologies. The other sustainable source of energy Neom can rely on is water. With more than 450 kilometres of coastline, Neom has a vast supply of seawater to use for water production, storage, fertilizer, and reusable freshwater for irrigation thanks to Neom’s extensive knowledge of desalination research. Engineers and architects here are focused on developing a water distribution network entirely connected through advanced interoperable modular systems to ensure minimal water loss. Neom also plans to use solar power to provide energy for the city. The city has the potential of using 20 MJ/m2 of perennial solar resources thanks to its desert location. Solar, along with wind and water energy will launch Neom into becoming one of the most sustainable cities in the world.

One of the most influential aspects of Neom is its emphasis on new technology and practices across different sectors. For example, city planners want to use innovation to change manufacturing in Saudi Arabia. With new materials and methods springing up, there are more possibilities for factories and other manufacturing systems to use nanotechnologies, 3D printing, robotics, renewable sources, and much more. Unrestrained by outdated and inefficient laws and infrastructure, Neom wants to become a living laboratory to test out all these new ideas and create an advanced manufacturing system, redefining boundaries as they develop. With new manufacturing systems being developed in Neom, the future of construction will also be greatly altered. As one of the largest developments in the world, the way architects and planners design and execute projects will have new systems, materials, and practices to consider. Neom will also reconceive performance and efficiency in the fundamentals of architecture such as usability, environmental sustainability, circulation, and materials.

With the combination of renewable energy resources, well-thought-out mobility across the city, and the innovative technologies being integrated into everyday life, the standard of living will improve. Neom believes its cutting-edge technology and practices will improve the quality of life, develop inclusive communities, enhance urban sustainability, and ensure the best use of technology to deliver a world-class city and attract the next generation of great thinkers and talent. All aspects of life will be reconfigured in Neom, including physical, mental, and social. As the project enters its second phase of construction and design, Saudi Arabia gets closer to the economic and social goals of its future. 

References: 

• Bostock, B. (2019, September 23). Everything we know about Neom, a ‘mega-city’ project in Saudi Arabia with plans for flying cars and robot dinosaurs. https://www.businessinsider.com/neom-what-we-know-saudi-arabia-500bn-mega-city-2019-9
• An Accelerator of human progress. (n.d.). https://www.neom.com/en-us/about/
• MY PRIMARY GOAL IS TO BE AN EXEMPLARY AND LEADING NATION IN ALL ASPECTS, AND I WILL WORK WITH YOU IN ACHIEVING THIS ENDEAVOUR… (n.d.). https://vision2030.gov.sa/en

Filled with a passion for architecture, traveling, journalism, athletics, and the environment, Emely Acobo is an architecture graduate student at Florida International University, with an aspiration to further develop green architecture as well as enhance her writing and research skills in journalism.

Sts Peter & Paul Church Renovation by Dion seminara architecture

15 famous structures of Uzbekistan

Related posts.

City elements and cognitive mapping

Khayelitsha: Inside one of the biggest slums in South Africa

Heritage Hotel: Gleneagles

Smart Cities: Integrating Technology to Enhance Urban Living

Dharavi: Inside one of the biggest slums in India

Orangi Town: Inside one of the biggest slums in Pakistan

• Architectural Community
• Architectural Facts
• RTF Architectural Reviews
• Architectural styles
• City and Architecture
• Fun & Architecture
• History of Architecture
• Design Studio Portfolios
• Designing for typologies
• RTF Design Inspiration
• Architecture News
• Career Advice
• Case Studies
• Construction & Materials
• Covid and Architecture
• Interior Design
• Know Your Architects
• Landscape Architecture
• Materials & Construction
• Product Design
• RTF Fresh Perspectives
• Sustainable Architecture
• Top Architects
• Travel and Architecture
• Rethinking The Future Awards 2022
• RTF Awards 2021 | Results
• GADA 2021 | Results
• RTF Awards 2020 | Results
• ACD Awards 2020 | Results
• GADA 2019 | Results
• ACD Awards 2018 | Results
• GADA 2018 | Results
• RTF Awards 2017 | Results
• RTF Sustainability Awards 2017 | Results
• RTF Sustainability Awards 2016 | Results
• RTF Sustainability Awards 2015 | Results
• RTF Awards 2014 | Results
• RTF Architectural Visualization Competition 2020 – Results
• Architectural Photography Competition 2020 – Results
• Designer’s Days of Quarantine Contest – Results
• Urban Sketching Competition May 2020 – Results
• RTF Essay Writing Competition April 2020 – Results
• Architectural Photography Competition 2019 – Finalists
• The Ultimate Thesis Guide
• Introduction to Landscape Architecture
• Perfect Guide to Architecting Your Career
• How to Design Architecture Portfolio
• How to Design Streets
• Introduction to Urban Design
• Introduction to Product Design
• Complete Guide to Dissertation Writing
• Introduction to Skyscraper Design
• Educational
• Hospitality
• Institutional
• Office Buildings
• Public Building
• Residential
• Sports & Recreation
• Temporary Structure
• Commercial Interior Design
• Corporate Interior Design
• Healthcare Interior Design
• Hospitality Interior Design
• Residential Interior Design
• Sustainability
• Transportation
• Urban Design
• Host your Course with RTF
• Architectural Writing Training Programme | WFH
• Editorial Internship | In-office
• Graphic Design Internship
• Research Internship | WFH
• Research Internship | New Delhi
• RTF | About RTF
• Submit Your Story

Looking for Job/ Internship?

Rtf will connect you with right design studios.

More From Forbes

The Smart Cities Of The Future: 5 Ways Technology Is Transforming Our Cities

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

How smart is your home? If it’s anything like mine, it’s a heck of a lot smarter than it was 10 or even five years ago. That’s because our homes are now stocked with intelligent devices, like smart thermostats, smart speakers, and smart lightbulbs. But the trend for intelligent spaces extends far beyond our homes. All around the world, entire cities are also becoming smart. 

What are smart cities, and why do we need them?

A smart city is one that leverages technology to increase efficiencies and improve the quality of services and life for its residents. Smart city initiatives can cover anything from power distribution, transport systems, street lights, and even rubbish collection. The idea is to use data and technology to make everyday life easier and better for the people who live and work in the city, while maximizing the use of resources.

More and more of us are living in cities – the UN predicts that 68 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050. And this means our cities are facing growing environmental, societal, and economic challenges. By making cities smarter, we can overcome some of these challenges and make cities better places to live. One report by McKinsey Global Institute found smart city technology can improve key quality of life indicators – such as the daily commute, health issues, or crime incidents – by 10 to 30 percent .

This is all possible thanks to a "perfect storm" of technology trends – trends that allow us to create spaces in which humans and technology interact in a more connected, intelligent, and automated way. Think of trends such as artificial intelligence, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomous vehicles. Combined, advances like these are changing the world and how we live in it. Our cities are no exception.

How technology is changing cities

Best Travel Insurance Companies

Best covid-19 travel insurance plans.

I’ve written before about smart city initiatives in my home town of Milton Keynes , but let’s look at some other examples of cities getting smarter:

1. Keeping traffic flowing

Traffic is the bane of many a city-dweller's life, but technology offers some promising solutions. For example, public transport routes can be adjusted in real-time according to demand, and intelligent traffic light systems can be used to improve congestion. In the Chinese city of Hangzhou, an AI-based smart “City Brain” has helped to reduce traffic jams by 15 percent .

2. Using city resources more efficiently

Mobile and broadband company Telefonica has been investing heavily in smart city technology in its home country, Spain. In one example, sensors are attached to refuse containers to report, in real-time, how full they are – which means refuse collectors don't have to waste time traveling to bins that are only half-full. It also means KPIs can be more closely tied to bottom-line impact, such as how many bins are close to overflowing and won't be emptied within the next few hours. This is far more meaningful than measuring abstract factors, like how many waste collection trucks are out on the road.

3. Improving energy efficiency

As well as investing in clean energy sources, smart cities also use technology to help closely monitor real-time energy use and reduce energy consumption. For example, in Amsterdam , homes are being provided with smart energy meters that are designed to incentivize reduced energy consumption, and the city of Schenectady, New York is upgrading its street lights to LED technology, which allows the lights to be adjusted or dimmed based on real-time data.

4. Making cities safer

Thanks to the vast spread of Wi-Fi connectivity, IoT technologies, and CCTV cameras, cities are able to harness technology to improve resident safety and boost incident response times. In New Orleans, for example, real-time video data from Bourbon Street is analyzed in order to better track and allocate resources on the ground, and improve public safety.

5. Encouraging greater collaboration with citizens

One of the really exciting things about smart city technology is that it encourages residents to get more involved. Common examples include apps that allow citizens to report local issues more easily, or community networking platforms that allow neighbors to connect and share resources. In another example, a low-cost environmental testing kit is encouraging residents to collect local environmental data. The Smart Citizen Kit can be placed in locations like balconies and windowsills to gather data on the local environment, including air pollution and noise. The data is streamed to an online platform, effectively creating a crowdsourced map of data from all over the world.

This move towards intelligent spaces and smart places is just one of 25 technology trends that I believe will transform our society. Read more about these key trends – including plenty of real-world examples – in my new book, Tech Trends in Practice: The 25 Technologies That Are Driving The 4th Industrial Revolution .

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Robots — Cities of the Future: Advantages and Disadvantages of Robots

Cities of The Future: Advantages and Disadvantages of Robots

• Categories: Advantages of Technology Disadvantages of Technology Robots

About this sample

Words: 1372 |

Published: Feb 9, 2023

Words: 1372 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Introduction, disadvantages:, advantages:, conclusion:.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Information Science and Technology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 1120 words

2 pages / 910 words

3 pages / 1371 words

3 pages / 1653 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Robots

“Do you like human beings?” Edward asked. “I love them” Sophia replied. “Why?” “I am not sure I understand why yet” The conversation above is from an interview for Business Insider between a journalist [...]

“Ethical frontiers of robotics” is a short text by Noel Sharkey which tries to focus on the advancement of scientific knowledge to the level of manufacturing robots that are about to take over the human responsibilities. The [...]

As technology continues to progress and new remarkable machines are becoming more common in the workplaces across the world, there is an increasing concern that these robot-like devices will become ubiquitous in our daily lives. [...]

Robotics means the revise and application of robot technology. Robotics is a field of engineering that consists of conception, pattern, manufacture, and operation of machines task for a particular high exactness and repetitive [...]

After the first robotic prototype, robotic machines gained massive publicity paving the way for the adoption of robotic machines in industries and workplaces. After a few decades, the robotics revolution - propelled by advanced [...]

Through the use of laser-generated, hologram-like 3D pictures flashed into the photosensitive resin, experts at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, with their academic collaborators{, have uncovered they can build complex 3D parts [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• B2 Cities of the Future

The essay for B2 First Writing Part 1 is always written for the teacher. It should be well organised, with an introduction, your opinions on the ideas given and an appropriate conclusion.

For essay, you are asked the following question about the city of the future.

The cities that we are living in now are often overcrowded and polluted. What improvements do you think we will see in the cities in the future?

Notes 1. providing more places to relax 2. redesigning the place we work and live in 3. improving transportation systems

More exercises available:

You are required to produce two pieces of writing. The first piece is compulsory and will be an essay of 140-190 words. For the second, you can choose from an article, email/letter, essay, review or report (B2 First for schools the report is replaced with a story) of 140-190 words.

• B2 Article Video
• B2 Book Review Video
• B2 Descriptive Email Video
• B2 Place Review Video
• B2 Short Story Video
• B2 Fast Food
• B2 Following Fashion
• B2 Live Concert
• B2 Pollution Problems
• B2 Taking a Gap Year
• B2 A Work of Art
• B2 Being a Celebrity
• B2 Life Away
• B2 Preventing Crime
• B2 School Improvement
• B2 Shopping Online
• B2 Tablet or Laptop
• B2 The Countryside
• School Canteen
• B2 A School Trip to Italy
• B2 An Important Day
• B2 Forgetful Girl
• The Hidden Beach
• The Lost Photo
• B2 IMDb Website Review
• B2 Jurassic Park Book Review
• B2 Mountain Bike Park
• B2 Romeo and Juliet Play Review
• B2 Ted Film Review
• Scarlett Animation Review
• B2 Berlin Travel Report
• B2 Shops Report
• B2 Visiting Places Report
• B2 Birthday Party Letter
• B2 Computer Games Email
• B2 Favourite Film Email
• B2 Holiday in Thailand Email
• B2 New Attraction Letter
• B2 Place to Visit Email
• B2 Spending Money Email
• B2 Visiting Relative Email

You need to be able to understand a range of texts, including how they are organised and the opinions and attitudes expressed in them. The texts will be from sources familiar to you such as magazines, articles, fiction and advertisements, but targeted at the interests of students.

Students’ use of English will be tested by tasks which show how well they can control their grammar and vocabulary.

• Use of English Part 1
• Use of English Part 2
• Use of English Part 3
• Use of English Part 4
• Reading Part 5
• Reading Part 6
• Reading Part 7

For this part, you practice vocabulary by using words with similar meanings, collocations, linking phrases, phrasal verbs, etc.

• B2 First Use of English Video
• Becoming Famous
• Cycling Scheme
• Film Stars and Music Celebrities
• Going on a diet
• Single or Mixed Sex Schools
• The History of Football
• The Poor and Less Fortunate
• The Special Bus
• Why do we need to play?

For this part, you practice grammar and vocabulary.

• Better swimming
• Cardboard Bike
• Dealing with waste plastic
• Drinking Water
• Fit for Sports
• Following Your Nose
• Growing Bananas
• Holiday with a Friend
• Making Perfume
• The Farm Trip
• The Jobs Market
• Tree Climbing
• Weather Forecasting
• Young Enterprise

For this part, you practice vocabulary word-building by changing different words using a base word.

• Angel of Mercy
• Fast Food Industry
• Life on Other Planets
• Music in Schools
• Mystery Weekend Break
• Pollution Problems
• Understanding Time
• Workforce on the Move

For this part,  you have to express a message in different ways showing flexibility and resource in the use of language.

• B2 First Use of English Part 4
• B2 Key Word Transformation 1
• B2 Key Word Transformation 10
• B2 Key Word Transformation 2
• B2 Key Word Transformation 3
• B2 Key Word Transformation 4
• B2 Key Word Transformation 5
• B2 Key Word Transformation 6
• B2 Key Word Transformation 7
• B2 Key Word Transformation 8
• B2 Key Word Transformation 9

For this part, you practice how to understand the details of a text, including opinions and attitudes.

• Cycling to India
• Hottest Place on Earth
• Living and Working in Another Country
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Wrestler who Wrote a Book

For this part, you practice how to understand the structure and follow the development of a text.

• Benefits of Getting Fit
• Our Polluted World

For this part, you practice how to find specific information in a text or texts.

• Collecting Things
• English Seaside Resorts
• Teenage Summer Camps

Requires being able to follow and understand a range of familiar spoken materials, such as news programmes, public announcements and other sources, but targeted at the interests of the learners.

• Speaking Part 1
• Speaking Part 2
• Speaking Part 3
• Speaking Part 4
• Listening Part 1
• Listening Part 2
• Listening Part 3
• Listening Part 4

In this part you talk to the examiner about yourself and your life, e.g. your name, school, interests and future plans.

B2 Speaking Part 1 Exercise 1 B2 Speaking Part 1 Exercise 2 B2 Speaking Part 1 Exercise 3

In this part, you talk about two photos on your own which you have to compare for about 1 minute . After you have finished, your partner will be asked a short question about your photo. When your partner has spoken about their photos for about 1 minute , you will be asked a question about their photos.

B2 Speaking Part 2 Exercise 1

In this part you express ideas with your partner by looking at a discussion point that the examiner gives you.

This will be available soon.

In this part, you focus on general aspects of a topic with the examiner or you may involve your partner.

In this part, you will hear people talking in eight different situations.

Entertainment Short Conversations Talking about Sports

In this part, you will hear someone being interviewed.

Extreme Snowboarding Future Options Newly Published Book The Talent Show

In this part, you will hear five people talking about different things.

Demonstration Travel Worries

In this part, you will hear an interview.

Protecting the Environment Staying Healthy

• Customs and Traditions
• Entertainment and Leisure
• Environmental and Nature
• Future Jobs and Education
• Identity and Well-being
• Travel and Adventure

Customs and Traditions explores how we celebrate our cultural identity across the globe.

• Christmas Hard Exercises
• Story of Halloween
• Valentine Message

Entertainment and Leisure explores how we spent our free time.

Environment and Nature explores the way humans and animals live, adapt and change on our planet.

• Global Changes

Exploring how different societies create roles for people to develop their skills and knowledge.

• Future Schools
• Sport at School
• School Rules
• Fashion Design

Exploring how we learn and adjust to the world around us. .

• Taking Risks
• Natural Disasters

Exploring how we experience the world through our life journeys

• Travelling around the World

Cambridge English exams are designed for learners at all levels from the pre-intermediate level Cambridge English: Key (KET) to the very advanced level Cambridge English: Proficiency (CPE). These exams give candidates proof of their ability to use English in a wide variety of contexts, relevant to work, study and leisure activities.

A2 Key | B1 Preliminary | B2 First

How useful were these activities?

Click on a trophy to rate them!

Average rating 4.2 / 5. Vote count: 16

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

Future City

Ages: Middle School

Types: Submission, Presentation

Scope: International

[email protected]

Participate

Future City commences with a thought-provoking query: "How can we contribute to a better world?" In response, students in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades embark on an imaginative journey, involving research, design, and the construction of futuristic cities that serve as living testaments to their solutions for citywide sustainability challenges. Previous themes have encompassed issues such as stormwater management, urban agriculture, and sustainable energy solutions.

Students present their Future City with multiple deliverables; a city essay; a city model; a project plan, & a presentation and Q&A to judges at Regional Competitions in January. Regional winners represent their region at the Competition Finals in Washington, DC in February.

Teams describe the unique features of their city and their solution to that year’s challenge.

Teams build a physical model of their city (in one piece or multiple segments) using recycled materials. the model showcases the team’s city of the future, their solution to this year’s challenge, and has at least one moving part., city presentation and q&a, three student team members give a 7-minute presentation about their future city and their solution to the challenge. teams have an 8-minute question and answer period, conducted with a panel of judges from the engineering, city, and technical communities., project plan, teams complete a project plan to help them plan and organize their work. they use it throughout the project., *points for deliverables are subject to change by year*.

Website: http://futurecity.org

Managing Organization: DiscoverE

Contact: [email protected]

Eligibility: Future City is open to teams of students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. Teams must have at least 3 students.

Signup Newsletter

Sign me up for the newsletter!

The Institute of Competition Sciences (ICS) was founded in 2012 to help transform learning into an exciting challenge for all students. We exist to support students in realizing the full potential of their future.

Quick Links

• Competitions
• Privacy Policy
• Terms and Conditions

Connect with us on social media

Copyright © 2024 Institute of Competition Sciences. All rights reserved.