FUTURE CITIES: WHAT WILL THEY REALLY BE LIKE?

Taller, greener, smarter and home-based

Artists' impressions of tomorrow's urban utopias usually depict cities of giant towers, some bulbous or twisting, others connected by walkways in the sky and buzzed by flying cars. The reality could be more practical, liveable and equally imaginative.

Significantly, we, the people, may have a bigger say in how our cities evolve. The BMW Guggenheim Lab, a collaboration between the car-maker and art museum, is an ideas forum for urban design which is holding a rolling programme of talks in cities around the world. Discussions held at its first stop, New York, suggest future cities will be shaped increasingly at grass-roots level by ordinary citizens says Thomas Girst, BMW Group spokesman. “Small urban experiments initiated from a culture of participation, crowd sourcing, community cohesiveness... will inspire larger, city and region-wide efforts aimed at urban improvement,” says Girst.

Despite the Lab's initial findings, planning professionals dominate thinking for now, and 'Place-making' is one of their favourite buzzwords. Instead of dividing a city into distinct residential, retail, office and industrial zones, the idea is for districts to become a mix of these elements, so it is alive all hours of the day, and enables people to live close to their work places, shops and leisure facilities, saving them time and money on travel. Early examples include the City of London which, in addition to being Europe's key financial district, is now a prime residential area, because it has changed from being a place where hardly anybody lived to become home to 9,000 people, many of them residing in new, luxury apartment blocks, such as The Heron.

The future city will be high tech. Companies like Siemans, Philips and Cisco Systems promote 'smart cities' where technological innovations like wireless sensor networks will be installed by authorities to manage resources better, such as dimming and brightening street lighting depending on when it is needed most. Jeroen Beekmans, partner at Golfstromen, a creative agency based in Amsterdam, works with Phillips to explore how intelligent technologies, such as Internet accessing smart-phones, can shape cities. He believes citizens may manage public functions like street lighting in future. “Now we all have a smartphone, but in ten years we might wear innovative glasses that turn the city into an operating system,” he says.

Another technological development to watch is 3-D printing. Using blueprints stored on the Internet, 3-D printers can print out objects like chairs and door knobs using plastic or metal powder as 'ink'. Scientists are looking to bring down costs so we can have 3-D printers at home to print out smaller objects, and machines in high street premises to produce larger pieces. If realised, this technology will speed up the demise of traditional retailing which has been battered by on-line shopping, leading to fewer shops on our high streets. We may also see buildings constructed with 3-D printers. Loughborough University has developed a machine to print out wall sections with cavities for cabling. If the machine becomes commercially viable, then construction of buildings will become faster, because developers can install 3-D printed sections, rather than fabricate walls on site.

The Internet is enabling more people to work from home, so companies will need fewer offices in future, which means fewer and smaller office districts. In place of offices we have work hubs appearing in suburban and central city districts to accommodate home workers who want to work outside of the house part of the week, mainly so they can enjoy human company. Operating like gyms, these hubs have desks, phones, printers and even cafes and libraries for users who pay monthly membership charges. More people working from home means fewer people commuting, so the relentless expansion of roads and commuter railways could ease up in many cities, possibly stop and even go into reverse, assisting another trend, pedestrianisation.

On New York's Manhattan Island, a three kilometre long stretch of overhead railway has been closed and turned into The High Line Park pedestrian walkway. In central London, Braham Street, a previously busy four lane road, has become Braham Park, a quiet, green oasis. London is following the example of the Netherlands by turning some roads, like Exhibition Road in Kensington, into shared spaces that cars and pedestrians both use. It slows down traffic and is safe, but irritates drivers, because they have to negotiate pedestrians in their path, leading some of them to leave the car at home.

Reducing traffic in cities is part of a wider drive to make them Greener, so too are low carbon building projects which are appearing in greater numbers. In Helsinki, British engineers and designers, Arup, leads an international team master-planning a Dhs272million low carbon housing, office and retail complex called Low2No on behalf of Finnish development partners Sitra, SRV and VVO. Intended to be a role model for other low CO2 schemes, the 22,000 square meter project will have energy efficient buildings made from sustainable materials like wood and an off-site wind farm to offset carbon emissions.

Some new eco-districts are being named after the company that builds them, so we may expect some future urban landscapes to become branded products just like groceries. For example, Masdar City in the UAE is named after Masdar, a renewable energy subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi government-owned Mubadala Development Company. When fully complete in 2025 the city will be home to 40,000 people and a showcase for renewable energy and clean industries developed by the company's recently built Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

London studio, Foster + Partners, is designing Masdar City to be energy efficient. Buildings are being constructed close to each other to create wind canyons and to ensure the sun only shines for one hour a day in these narrow pedestrian corridors, a passive cooling system for buildings and pedestrians that reduces the need for active cooling systems like air conditioning. This design follows the pattern of traditional Arab cities which maximised shady areas. This means future cities may provide opportunities for design ideas from the past to make a come back.

However, not all schemes come to fruition. In China, developer SIIC had plans to build Dongtan, an eco-city near Shanghai. The first phase was scheduled for completion in 2010, but it remains un-built and so does the remainder of the city which was intended to become home for 500,000 people. Arup master-planned this city, but implementation has been postponed indefinitely by the developer with no explanation given.

Unrealised dreams like Dongtan have led some architects like Austin Williams, director of the Future Cities Project, to argue that the current emphasis on sustainability and low impact architecture has resulted in poor quality design and urban planning.

Usually, we think of cities getting bigger, but some could shrink. Some already are. In the US city of Detroit, 12,000 homes have been abandoned by people escaping economic decline for better times elsewhere. Those houses that don't fall down are knocked down. Civic authorities are attempting to consolidate who and what is left behind into a smaller, manageable unit, so homes are no longer separated by acres of “urban prairie” as exists in some parts of the city now.

Of course, the Detroit authorities might want to consider taking advantage of this enforced ruralisation to adopt the Roman principle of rus in urbe, of deliberately bringing the countryside into the city to make it a greener, healthier place. This principle exists in the British city of Bath where sheep graze in parks within the city centre, and in the London suburb of Richmond which has a dairy farm open to the public. Cowboys in Detroit? It may happen.