Published by Louis Bellemare on 2024-02-28
Imagining what a city of the future is not a fantasy. It is a necessity. The current model of our big cities no longer guarantees the same quality of life. We have to reinvent the concept of cities, to meet more human aspirations and to bring better collective well-being.
According to the UN, by 2050, 68% of the world’s people will live in urban areas, compared to 55% today. Population in cities will have increased by 59% to around 6.7 billion people, compared to 4.2 billion today. There were 751 million in 1950. [1] So the world is urbanizing faster than the world’s population is growing.
However, population growth and migration to cities are confronted with many problems. Among them, we can mention climate change and demand for housing. There is also a lack of developed space and scarcity of land. Other issues include a high demand for energy, mobility needs of people, and transport of goods. Additionally, there are food supply needs, landscape planning, and provision of health services, education, and leisure service.
Those needs are in accordance to a social yield curve. This curve predicts that the benefits of the city diminish after a certain population threshold. Social costs are generated by numerous problems if investment is insufficient to provide necessary services to the population. As example, negative externalities, such as pollution and road traffic are often mentioned.
How then can we resolve all these problems which cannot be resolved by themselves?
Two opposing models
It is precisely to answer this question that we could imagine a city of the future. The idea is not to foresee the future, because that is impossible. It is rather to imagine an optimal model that would respect certain criteria, a sort of reference model. Solutions could be in a modification of urban planning concepts. It would suggest that the actual evolutionary or adaptive model of existing cities be replaced by a new planned model. This would lead to the construction of completely new cities, to respond to the problems mentioned above.
Of course, big cities will not disappear because of their inability to adapt. But they are not ideal. They were built according to certain technologies of the time. People using automobiles individually is no longer suitable. Huge highways and interchanges designed for the suburbs don’t meet the needs of 21st century families. The spread of spacious houses has become unsuitable for modern life. Economists would say that our cities are inside of a technological trap.
New technologies are emerging. New sources of clean energy are also emerging. These developments are leading to new paradigms. Cities are now being designed to meet human needs. Models that could bring better benefits to the population.
What are the criteria?
Several projects for the city of the future are underway around the world. They are not some sort of intellectual curiosity. Their mean is to demonstrate viability. From these experiences, one can establish criteria to design a city of the future. What the cities of the future would look like.
1- A city without cars or which greatly limits automobile traffic
The city of the future should be car-free or greatly limit automobile traffic. There are now several in the world, including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bermingham, Brussels, Gans, Helsinki, Oslo [2]
One of the most interesting models is Pontevedra [3], a Spanish city of 83,000 inhabitants widely cited as a reference. Pontevedra has received numerous international awards for its quality of life, accessibility, and urban mobility policy.
In this city, there have been no cars for 15 years. Noise has decreased significantly and pollution has decreased by more than 65%. This corresponds to what happened in all cities that have decided to limit the use of automobiles, including Paris. They have achieved a substantial reduction in pollution limiting cars usage.
In Pontevedra, transportation services can be provided by efficient electric public transportation. Alternatively, they can be provided by a network of shuttles serving the community.
Furthermore, it would be wrong to claim that limiting automobile use would have an impact on wealth or economic development.
2- A city with shared services for the population
A car-free city would not only diminish pollution but would also save a lot of space. Space is probably the most precious resource of a city, as well as energy, food and transport services. In Pontevedra, the space has been transformed to facilitate the displacement of pedestrians and bicycles. In several cities with large road infrastructures, this concept would require a complete rethinking of the development of a territory.
Let’s mention that replacing gas vehicles with more ecological vehicles would not necessarily save space. Unless there is a substantial reduction in the size of the vehicles. This would mean losing the benefit of one of the most interesting aspects of a car-free city.
Furthermore, densification makes it possible to maintain a good quality of life and meet a growing demand for housing. Community services, areas parks, restaurants, rest areas or resorts, open-air schools, greenhouses and meeting rooms would be more easily available.
Many of these outdoor areas could be covered with domes for optimal temperature control and food production. Installing geodesic domes on different locations or common areas would artificially generate a greenhouse effect and save energy.
3- A trendy city
Of course, this city would be connected to allow teleworking, but much more.
Woven City is a city of the future imagined by the car manufacturer Toyota.
This city has been built at the foot of Mount Fuji in Japan. It features fully autonomous cars, robots on every street corner, and an artificial intelligence road management system. The goal is to ‘ develop a better society by accelerating the technology cycle and service development. [4]
The effectiveness of teleworking was demonstrated during the last pandemic as well as its impact on the use of transport. It helps avoid road congestion caused by commuting. In a connected city, travel for work would therefore be reduced. Travel would most of the time be limited to leisure, sport, visits and occasional meetings.
Travel would be provided by public transportation or by small, autonomous electric vehicles. Manufactured goods would carried out in specially designed areas outside the city. Production of goods would be assured by advanced robotic systems.
4-A city with better ergonomics
Most cities have developed around major transport routes such as railways, motorways, and seaports. Planning was thought in the function of transporting infrastructures. But also in the function of the morphology of the landscape, where there are watercourses, mountains, plains, valleys, etc.
This is why transport networks are so complex. Why construction and maintenance are so costly. Do we have to build huge bridges or tunnels, viaducts, and numerous intersections? The result will inevitably impact urban sprawl and the continuous expansion of a city. Why build such infrastructures if there would be no cars anyway, or if they were, they would be small?
The habitat of the city should be in concentric circles around a central space offering different services to the population. Public transport could be provided by a circular electric metro running along the different habitats. There would be no intersections or switching, which would gain in efficiency and time.
Food production could be carried out in greenhouses built inside or on the outskirts of the city. Food and goods would be provided by a parallel transport network dedicated to the transport of goods.
5-A city powered by renewable energy
The city would be powered by entirely renewable energy sources, either wind turbines or huge solar panels.
Conclusion
Perhaps governments could start thinking now about what a city of the future might look like.
Louis Bellemare
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