Urban developments have a much greater time scale than most other social and economic activities. In order to create attractive, sustainable and resilient cities, city planners and policy makers need to be able to envision what the future will be like.
Most of us are trend followers using heuristics, expecting tomorrow to be just like today – maybe a little bit better or a little be worse, but no shocking change. Unfortunately, due to the huge gap in the developmental speed between technology and cities, this heuristic approach has always failed. We’ve learned this the hard way – through enormously expensive trial and error. And we are still paying the bills (climate change, pollution, resource crises, congestions, urban sprawl, et al) for these failed experiments.
While exponential growth of technology is changing our society and economy evermore rapidly and fundamentally, the challenge city-changers face is huge, unprecedented and urgent.
We need a different, scientifically-based method for anticipating the future.
To anticipate the future, one has to know the past and the present. Despite an overflow of literature attempting to ferret out various technological trends with great depth and detail, there is little that can provide urbanites with a concise, holistic and integrated view.
Thus, this study is devoted to presenting a selection of hard trends (science-based, long- term trends that are highly probable or effectively certain to have tremendous and lasting impacts). These trends are intensively shaping our lifestyles, our cities and our urban settings. Consequently, it is the understanding of these scientifically-based trends that will create a compact, holistic and possibly objective overview of what’s to come.
Another feature that distinguishes this from many other studies, is that it is not focused only on technology. Rather, it includes four additional major domains – social, ecological, economic and geopolitical.
We believe that, technology is not the (only) cause of change, but rather is a device or catalyst; we need to put it together with other pieces in order to develop a complete understanding of where we stand and where we are going.
To close this short preface, here our key messages:
- Over the past century, due to incomplete understandings of the natures of humans, technology and cities, we learnt – through trial and error – a great deal about what does not work.
- We also discovered that cities can be great engines for growth, innovation and improved life quality.
- Many beliefs we hold true today, such as that cities are necessarily more resource and energy efficient, may be rendered obsolete in the future due to technological advances.
We need to totally rethink cities starting from the fundamentals, including the following three main aspects:
- Human needs (e.g. fundamental drives, motives, fears and emotions) and behavioral patterns;
- The changing nature of our society and economy;
- A framework for evaluating short- and long-term impacts, costs and benefits of technologies, in order to make policies that lead to the development of better urban futures.
Co-Author: Prof. Dr. John L. Casti