In a world that is increasingly ‘international’, what does the future hold for our cities? Cities have traditionally thrived on their individual identities, branded in one word or phrase: London is creative, Paris is romantic, New York is non-stop.
But could all this be set to change? As our cities around the world converge technologically, will they also become indistinct from one another?
If we read up on the technological changes that have taken place in the urban environment, we might assume the answer to that question is "yes".
By 2050, about 70% of the global population will be urban dwellers
Connected future
We are constantly fed the narrative of the increasingly globalised and connected community – populations using an international digital currency, going from place to place in their internet-enabled, self-driving cars, loyally eating and drinking in internationally branded restaurants and bars.
This narrative imagines cities as places of hyper-connectivity. These are places where traffic data is monitored and analysed to prevent traffic jams and free up unused roads.
Where populations grow their food in high-rise, urban greenhouses and they never meet a shopkeeper because everything is bought online and delivered by drone.
Everyone is renting, house- sharing or sofa-surfing as they move nomadically from place to place, eschewing property ownership and calling on ‘community’ services, such as Uber and Airbnb.
But such a view of the city is really rather unimaginative and tech-driven. It feels like the Palo Alto venture capitalist’s or engineer’s dream of what cities should be like. Instead, what we want is the citizen’s dream of a better civic system, made up of social spaces in which all kinds of people can live, work and play.
It is true that our planet now has a predominantly urban population, with an estimated 90% of population growth expected to occur in cities. By 2050, about 70% of the global population will be urban dwellers. This puts pressure on us to solve some of the forthcoming problems.
Dwindling resources
How will we have enough food to eat? Where will everyone live? But the ‘internet-enabled’ scenario outlined above is a vision of a future city that is actually a remnant of the past – it’s a 2.0 version of city-planning, based on an old paradigm of engineering and physical infrastructure made digital. It is still a framework for thinking about cities as hardware rather than software.
The city moves with your mood. Everything about the city becomes more ‘communicative’ in a human rather than an analytical sense.
We can begin to envisage a better urban environment once we start to think about the software of cities. Once we can imagine what a 3.0 version of the city might be like, we can think about our environment and everything in it being communicative.
And it will be thanks to the internet being integrated into our environment; into our parks, schools, shops, homes, workplaces, maybe even the trees. Interactions with the environment become more sensory, more responsive, more organic by including smell, tactility and sound in everyday objects we would normally overlook.
The city moves with your mood. Everything about the city becomes more ‘communicative’ in a human rather than an analytical sense.
It is also a more decentralised city. Public interest moves to the centre, as do services like wi-fi, which become freely accessible to all. Smells and other multisensory elements help you find your way around. The city comes alive.
Spaces become more intergenerational as we discover the things that old and young have in common and the experiences they can exchange. We start thinking about cities as places that make you healthy, rather than ill.
If anything, the future operating system of cities could make the whole environment truly conversational – and London will become more creative and Paris more romantic than ever before.
MEET OUR THINKERS
