Cities of Tomorrow

Looking at big ideas for the futures of cities

I am comfortable saying the future of cities will not be steampunk.

As a child I didn’t get all the cool things I wanted. Heck, most of my toys came from McDonald’s. But one luxury we had was that every few years, after my mother’s Herculean scrimping and saving, she would take us to Disney World. Off-season, off-resort, by train. But we went. And like most little kids I loved it. But like the weird little kid I was, my favorite part was the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.¹

Despite having barely been in a city, I was fascinated by how the city of tomorrow would look. This turned out not to be it. Monorails gave us only a great song and geodesic spheres didn’t catch on. Walt didn’t nail it on this one. But they were big ideas, and 34 years later they still spark my imagination. Because although it feels odd to describe something that has existed for nine millennia this way, the city was a big idea.

Cities have played a central role in history. They’ve been engines of innovation and economic growth. There’s a compelling argument that deurbanization a leading cause of the European Dark Ages. Humans have increasingly flocked towards cities. Even in America, where we claim we want to be like the rural people of old, our story is one of relentless urbanization.

I fully understand many people don’t love cities. As half a country boy (my upbringing) and half a city boy (my choices as an adult) I love both but sympathize with those who don’t. The less said on my feelings about suburbs the better, but as a subscriber to the philosophy of letting people like what they like, I respect that some of you want a picket fence and a cul de sac and a convenient Target and Red Lobster. But regardless of your personal preferences, cities are extremely important societally. Thus, the question of “what is the city of tomorrow?” is ideal for big ideas.

And there are a lot of big ideas for the city of tomorrow. Last week’s comments got going on model cities which are interesting. I am hopeful about their future, even if they run the gamut from inspiring to baffling to horrifying. And there is plenty of room for innovation and improvement in the areas of governance, taxation, economic bases, transportation, layout, architecture, and so on. But I want to set our sights a little bigger this week. So, let’s start with where we left off last week, with Saudi Arabia’s NEOM.

In fact, since the last time we saw each other, NEOM is back in the news, but this time for something good. But NEOM discussion begins and ends with The Line, the mega-linear smart city. There’s quite a bit in The Line that seems like the city of tomorrow. An emphasis on walkability is a common thread we see in many of these projects simply because the space cars need – both to operate and be stored – makes planning around them difficult. And although this seems anathema to non-New York Americans, it’s not that much of a deal breaker in other countries. Being powered by renewable energy is another common idea, which, if feasible, also makes sense.

The interesting parts about The Line are its tri-layer design (one for pedestrians, one for infrastructure, one for transportation) and its size. This actually takes us back to Walt Disney, and his subterranean transportation in EPCOT. The second one seems more difficult.

But even if it could be built, the goal is it will house nine million people. That’s the size of London. And most large cities grew quite organically, over the space of centuries. We covered those problems, but these are different problems. You need those people pretty quickly. Anyone familiar with Detroit will understand the problem of having a city with far more infrastructure than people. You get a ghost town. Either people are so spread out that the benefits of a city are nullified, or you have empty parts perfect for crime. We’re talking over a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s population. If the plan is for people to come in from around the world, you run into the issue that Saudi Arabia is, well, a bit more restrictive on some things than other countries.² Particularly for women. If you’re even able to build this place, how are you going to get that many people to live there?

Of course, if we want to talk about cities of tomorrow that are going to have trouble attracting population, what about a city on the Moon? The idea of a city on the Moon is not limited to excellent novels with disappointing endings. Elon Musk – who I have to be nice about now because I want more traffic for my criminally underfollowed Twitter account – wants to build cities on the Moon. And Mars. This is the definition of a Big Idea but it’s also not worth making plans to move. Leaving aside the issue of transportation, for a species that between itself and its ancestors has spent a few eons adapting to live on Earth, living on non-Earth is incomprehensibly difficult. This isn’t homesteaders on the Oregon Trail. The challenges that faced those people – farming, building a home, defense, dysentery – were the types of problems that average people could deal with. Extraterrestrial challenges are far beyond the mass of humanity, so unless there’s utmost trust in the institutions, only the type of people who could be astronauts are ever going to live there. That doesn’t mean this is an impossible dream, but we may want to look a little closer to home.

Maybe the city of tomorrow is under the sea. Afterall, I hear it’s better down where it’s wetter. And this makes sense on a lot of levels. Most of our planet is water. If you’re alarmed about climate change, you think that’s going to get even worse. You’d have similar oxygen problems but you’re both much closer to help and at least you have gravity and the benefits of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic shield. And there’s people already working on this.

Undersea living does have a lot of promise. We know we can have people underwater. Construction would be modular, avoiding The Line’s problems. Theoretically, desalinization and thermal energy would provide almost unlimited water and power. Yet, we run into the same problem. Humans didn’t evolve to live underwater. We’d need to essentially create the surface underwater with the correct pressure and oxygen in habitats that must be failsafe because failure is death. For now, these seem more appropriate for science and hotels than cities. Although perhaps floating cities offer more promise.

The topic of water does give us clues about the future of cities. Both the largest and earliest cities typically have proximity to water as a common feature. This is not accidental. Of course, our earliest cities would be close to our earliest civilizations which sprang up near rivers because of the fertile soil. But even cities as recent as Sao Paulo and New York City share this feature. Why?

The easy answer is transportation. Cities are histories of our ability to move people and things. They weren’t even possible until pack animals made moving food possible. And for most of human history, the easiest way to move people and things was by water. Until the industrial revolution when it became easier and cheaper to move things by land and possible to move things by air. The benefits of cities – the market for trading labor and things, ease of socialization and coupling, benefits of specialization, the interchange of ideas and learning – were now freed from waterways.

Cities grew up around our way of living. In speculating on the city of tomorrow, we should think about how we will live. Transportation itself tells us cities on Moon and Mars are difficult. We’d need to drastically lower the costs of escaping gravity to make those real cities, not just a larger version of the outpost we have on the South Pole.

There are big ideas out there for the city of tomorrow that are a bit more tethered to how people live, while still updating the city concept to fit into the world of today.

Chengdu Future City is betting that we won’t need cars, creating a car free city based around walkability, public transit, and autonomous vehicles while being served by two international airports. A mixture of the past, present, and potential future in terms of moving people. The Sustainable City in Dubai – and I think I’m bad at naming things – is also car free, opting for electric buggies. What’s interesting about this project is the onsite water recycling, farming, and – despite its proximity to oil - being able to go “off-grid” and powered by solar, which makes sense in a place like Dubai. The problem is that it’s still quite small and, worse, ludicrously expensive, which isn’t a sustainable – pun intended – model for a city.³

Most interesting to me is Stefano Boeri’s plans for Cancun Smart Forest City, and not just because it’s designed by an Italian.⁴ Although only designed for 130,000 people – about the size of Fargo⁵ – it offers an interesting vision:  

The “less pollution” part is good, and I find it aesthetically pleasing. But this also captures the idea that building cities around energy and water offer a path forward for cities. Modern society is built around consuming energy. But our cities were not built around modern energy usage for obvious reasons. Energy was just grafted on. No one thought about transmitting electricity during the founding of Paris. We should thus expect the city of tomorrow to be built around our most crucial factors, and that includes transportation, water, and energy. Maybe these cities aren’t built around how we’ll live in the future, but they’re at least not built around how we lived in the past.

We’re getting to the issue of determining the city of tomorrow: we don’t know how we’ll live tomorrow. Cities are as close to an organic creation as we have. They are born, grow, contract, and die based on how we live.⁶ Asking what the future of cities is might as well be asking what the future of humanity is. If we develop something that allows us to move vertically in an easy and safe manner – such as, ugh, flying cars – then a city in the sky would be inevitable. If hyperloop technology is real, perhaps the future of cities is underground. And the development of an easy way to escape the gravity well would make Muskopolis (Muskgrad? Muskople?) more achievable.

And that’s just transportation. Breakthroughs with desalinization would make those ocean cities logical. If we perfect solar energy to the point we have cheap, almost free energy, why wouldn’t we build cities in the hottest places on Earth? And where will be the next natural resource we want to extract?

Trying to guess the city of tomorrow is hard. Walt Disney’s version was wrong, but as he said about EPCOT, “It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed but will always be introducing and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems.” Which sounds a bit like humanity. We’re never completed and where we’ll go next is unpredictable. So why should our cities be any different?

1. The actual acronym uses Community but that was used interchangeably with City originally.

2. Not even touching on how worlds as disparate as golf and pro wrestling have seen backlashes to working with Saudi Arabia.

3. This video feels a little promotional for my tastes, but I thought the look inside the city was more interesting than the concept videos.

4. But being built by Germans. Historically, Italo-German partnerships don’t end well.

5. Or Exeter, Guelph, Darwin, and Ramgarh, for the most common countries of my non-American readers.

6. Originally, I had a link for each phase, but the history of Merv is so fascinating you should just read that.