Future Of Cities

How we can invent—but not predict—the future of cities. We cannot predict future cities, but we can invent them. Cities are largely unpredictable because they are complex systems that are more like organisms than machines. Neither the laws of economics nor the laws of mechanics apply; cities are the product of countless individual and collective decisions that do not conform to any grand plan. They are the product of our inventions; they evolve. In Inventing Future Cities, Michael Batty explores what we need to understand about cities in order to invent their future. Batty outlines certain themes—principles—that apply to all cities. He investigates not the invention of artifacts but inventive processes. Today form is becoming ever more divorced from function; information networks now shape the traditional functions of cities as places of exchange and innovation. By the end of this century, most of the world's population will live in cities, large or small, sometimes contiguous, and always connected; in an urbanized world, it will be increasingly difficult to define a city by its physical boundaries. Batty discusses the coming great transition from a world with few cities to a world of all cities; argues that future cities will be defined as clusters in a hierarchy; describes the future “high-frequency,” real-time streaming city; considers urban sprawl and urban renewal; and maps the waves of technological change, which grow ever more intense and lead to continuous innovation—an unending process of creative destruction out of which future cities will emerge.

Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.

One of The Washington Post's "Favorite Books of 2013" A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage? In a captivating blend of history and reportage, Daniel Brook travels to a series of major metropolitan hubs that were once themselves instant cities— St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai—to watch their “dress rehearsals for the twenty-first century.” Understanding today’s emerging global order, he argues, requires comprehending the West’s profound and conflicted influence on developing-world cities over the centuries. In 1703, Tsar Peter the Great personally oversaw the construction of a new Russian capital, a “window on the West” carefully modeled on Amsterdam, that he believed would wrench Russia into the modern world. In the nineteenth century, Shanghai became the fastest-growing city on earth as it mushroomed into an English-speaking, Western-looking metropolis that just happened to be in the Far East. Meanwhile, Bombay, the cosmopolitan hub of the British Raj, morphed into a tropical London at the hands of its pith-helmeted imperialists. Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation—the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay’s American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital—and how it may be transcended today. A fascinating, vivid look from the past out toward the horizon, A History of Future Cities is both a crucial reminder of globalization’s long march and an inspiring look into the possibilities of our Asian Century.

What might our cities look like in ten, twenty or fifty years? How may future cities face global challenges? Imagining the city of the future has long been an inspiration for many architects, artists and designers. This book examines how cities of the future have been visualised, what these projects sought to communicate and what the implications may be for us now. It provides a visual history of the future and explores the relationships between different visualisation techniques and ideologies for cities. Thinking about what futures are, who they are for, why they are desirable, and how and when they are to be brought into being is central to this book. Through visualisation we are able to experiment in ways that would be impractical and potentially hazardous in the real world, and this book, therefore, aims to contribute toward a better understanding of the power and agency of visualisations for future cities. In this lavishly illustrated text, the authors apply several critical lenses to consider the subject in different ways: technological futures, social futures, and global futures, providing a comprehensive survey and analysis of visions for future cities, and engaging creatively with how we perceive tomorrow's world and future studies more widely.

This heavily illustrated book shows what "homes and living might be in the 21st century."

This book is developed from and includes the presentations of leading international experts and scholars in the 12-14 July, 2006 Wingspread Workshop. With urban waters as a focal point, this book will explore the links between urban water quality and hydrology, and the broader concepts of green cities and smart growth. It also addresses legal and social barriers to urban ecological sustainability and proposes practical ways to overcome those barriers. Cities of the Future features chapters containing visionary concepts on how to ensure that cities and their water resources become ecologically sustainable and are able to provide clean water for all beneficial uses. The book links North American and Worldwide experience and approaches. The book is primarily a professional reference aimed at a wide interdisciplinary audience, including universities, consultants, environmental advocacy groups and legal environmental professionals.

This book features expert contributions on key sustainability aspects of urban water management in Chinese agglomerations. Both technical and institutional pathways to sustainable urban water management are developed on the basis of a broad, interdisciplinary problem analysis.