The cities of the future

The ‘La Ville du Quart d’Heure’ pro­ject is part of the ini­tia­tive by Paris mayor Anne Hi­dalgo to im­prove the lives of city res­i­dents. The prin­ci­ple is that in less than 15 min­utes a cit­i­zen should be able to ac­cess es­sen­tial needs, from ed­u­ca­tion and health to leisure and shop­ping. The idea is based on such things as the use of bi­cy­cles in­stead of pol­lut­ing ve­hi­cles, the trans­for­ma­tion of pub­lic spaces to give them mul­ti­ple uses, or elim­i­nat­ing park­ing spaces to cre­ate green spaces or bi­cy­cle park­ing lots. Mean­while, in April, Barcelona mayor Ada Colau pre­sented a pack­age of mo­bil­ity mea­sures that in­cludes elim­i­nat­ing cars from over 21 kilo­me­tres of city roads in favour of bi­cy­cles, with an extra 30,000 square me­tres for pedes­tri­ans. To achieve this, the plan fore­sees such ac­tions as clos­ing the side lanes of Gran Via and Avin­guda Di­ag­o­nal to traf­fic, and widen­ing the pave­ments of Via Lai­etana to 4.15 me­tres.

These are two ex­am­ples of ini­tia­tives in line with the UN’s Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals in the urban en­vi­ron­ment, which take as a base­line the im­pos­si­bil­ity of achiev­ing sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment with­out rad­i­cally trans­form­ing the way we man­age cities. Since 2007, more than half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion has been liv­ing in cities and that num­ber is ex­pected to rise to 60% by 2030. Cities and met­ro­pol­i­tan areas are nerve cen­tres of eco­nomic growth and con­tribute some 60% of world GDP, but they also ac­count for about 70% of global car­bon emis­sions and more than 60% of re­source use.

How­ever, rapid ur­ban­i­sa­tion is re­sult­ing in an in­creas­ing num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing in poor neigh­bour­hoods, in­fra­struc­ture and ser­vices (such as waste col­lec­tion and water and san­i­ta­tion sys­tems, roads and trans­porta­tion) that are in­ad­e­quate and over­bur­dened and that leads to more air pol­lu­tion and un­con­trolled urban growth.

The cities of the fu­ture will stand out for two rea­sons: their sus­tain­abil­ity and their tech­nol­ogy. For ex­am­ple, Songdo is a Ko­rean city with more than 100,000 in­hab­i­tants 65 kilo­me­tres from the cap­i­tal Seoul. Build­ing on Songdo began from scratch in 2002 with the as­pi­ra­tion of it be­com­ing the first smart and fully sus­tain­able city in the world. To achieve this, the city is com­mit­ted to the adop­tion of tech­nol­ogy and urban plan­ning that puts peo­ple at the cen­tre. There is a pre­dom­i­nance of mixed-use spaces, which bring to­gether res­i­den­tial areas, ser­vices, leisure, and jobs. The dis­tances be­tween peo­ple’s houses and the other spaces have been cal­cu­lated so that they can be cov­ered on foot, and if you need to take pub­lic trans­port, there are metro and bus stops within a 12-minute walk from home.

Con­ven­tional cars, vans and lor­ries have been re­placed by bi­cy­cles, while a pneu­matic tube sys­tem re­moves waste. In ad­di­tion, 40% of the city’s space is oc­cu­pied by green areas, and most res­i­den­tial build­ings are ex­pected to re­cy­cle at least 40% of the water they use and store en­ergy from re­new­able sources.

Mas­dar City is a green, self-suf­fi­cient city pro­ject de­signed by Nor­man Fos­ter that began con­struc­tion in 2008 next to Abu Dhabi Air­port. En­closed by a wall that pro­tects it from storms and winds, it has a roof that re­duces solar ra­di­a­tion and ab­sorbs sun­light to pro­duce elec­tric­ity. It is en­ergy self-suf­fi­cient, with a 10 megawatt pho­to­voltaic plant, and non-elec­tric ve­hi­cles are not al­lowed. De­signed for 50,000 in­hab­i­tants, it has just over 2,000 res­i­dents and so far only 10% of it has been built. The idea is to cre­ate a des­ti­na­tion at­trac­tive to tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies in order to re­duce the emi­rate’s eco­nomic de­pen­dence on oil.

Yet, the cases of Songdo and Mas­dar are ex­cep­tions, as most of the cities of the fu­ture will emerge from the evo­lu­tion of ex­ist­ing ones. If there is one ex­am­ple of a me­trop­o­lis where it looked as if col­lapse was in­evitable but has man­aged to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion, it is Sin­ga­pore. This Asian city-state, with 5.6 mil­lion in­hab­i­tants and a 7% growth fore­cast for 2030, has been ranked among the most sus­tain­able urban areas in the world, based on strate­gic plans com­mit­ted to op­ti­mis­ing mo­bil­ity and con­nec­tiv­ity. It has fast pub­lic trans­port and acts as a test bed to de­velop mo­bil­ity so­lu­tions that help re­duce its de­pen­dence on cars. In ad­di­tion, a net­work of sen­sors has been in­stalled to mea­sure pol­lu­tion and the vol­ume of traf­fic, to be able to react im­me­di­ately in case of need. Even a sys­tem of 3D maps has been cre­ated to mon­i­tor the en­ergy ef­fi­ciency of each build­ing, while hos­pi­tal doc­tors have helper ro­bots that are able to in­ter­act with hu­mans.

As for the green issue, su­pertrees have been cre­ated, ver­ti­cal gar­dens on steel struc­tures be­tween 25 and 50 me­tres high, which col­lect rain and are equipped with solar pan­els that gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity for night light­ing and to cool two green­houses that reg­u­late the city’s tem­per­a­ture. The 24-storey block of flats known as the Tree House is the largest ver­ti­cal gar­den in the world.

fea­ture