Future city

In less than a century our cities will see a radical reshape that will change the way we live. The concept of living, with the increase of population, is going to diversify from what it is today, from urban landscapes to transportation. The change that we will see first is probably the height of buildings: skyscrapers will be higher and higher setting new standards. Already we can see that engineering has been pushing its boundaries with new landmarks all over the world, but the future can't be about records among builders or countries, it must be about sustainability and ecology.

Our increasing population number is requiring more and more resources that are continuously becoming scarce and very expensive. Traditional fossil fuels are not the answer to our problem, they are polluting elements that are  increasingly deteriorating our health with higher and higher percentages of tumors reported each year by the W.H.O. (World Health Organization). These cases are directly linked to urban pollution, especially in developed countries.

The future must consider a better planned urbanistic design that will allow a better flow of traffic, and cars will also need to follow a major reshape using green fuel like hydrogen or batteries. There are several proposal made in the past to avoid overcrowding and urban sprawling, in a recent post we talked about Arcology by Italian architect Paolo Soleri, where in its projects and models he foresees cities that are self sufficient and do not quired outside resourcing to continue, their space is developed vertically in one big structure, rather than an horizontal and space consuming expansion. This involves food production inside the habitat or nearby enough to cut useless transportation from abroad.  

Green is they key feature that can resolve the issue of high CO2 level in downtown areas, the increased number of trees and plants in crucial trafficked zones will clean the air from pollution while the transition to hydrogen and electric cars is being made. This requires that the percentage of plants and grass that is commonly confined into public parks it to be opened to any surface. Grass roofs are a solution that can be applied to any building starting now, imagine if half the skyscrapers' roof of each downtown city is to be made of grass and plants; air quality would improve so much.

Bigger cities means bigger transportation requirements to sustain the population and their needs to freely move around, that's why it is required that the public transportation system updates its concept into a more efficient grid of movements. The future city will most likely have more than one level with streets and public walkways crossing at many levels of buildings because the normal grid that we know today will disappear into a more efficient one. We can't exclude the possibility to have vertical public transportation like big elevators that can carry 20, 30 or even more people to higher floors, terraces and public bridges that cross each building reducing cars, traffic jams and people's stress.

The Canadian city of Calgary in the Alberta province has already started to reshape the urbanistic concept for people walking around downtown. With the project named +15, the skywalk runs throughout the the city core for a length of 16km (10 miles), it is the longest of its kind in the world. 

Other massive city projects involve mega-structures being built where the amount of people living can be from 200.000 to 750.000 people, living in a portion of space than the actual conditions. Here below a drawing of the Zigurat Pyramid proposed in Dubai. 

Japan too has proposed a steel pyramid to be built in the Tokyo bay area to resolve the problem of increasing population and shortage of buildable land. The real problem with these futuristic projects it the quantity of materials needed for the construction, as well as the amount of workforce needed that will determine the time from when the structure is started to when it's finished. The Japanese pyramid is a possible project taken into consideration by the the government of Japan, but the quantity of steel needed has been predicted to be too high for currents production and stock. In fact if the construction is to be started today, Japan will outsource its entire steel capacity with the necessity of major purchase from other countries that will make the project's price soar without any prediction.