Five Things You Need to Know About the Future of Cities

Global Real Estate Insight asked me what their readers need to know about the future of cities. This is what I told them.

1. The world is fully urbanised already.
You just haven’t noticed. It has become trendy in recent years to say the world is half-urbanised because more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. But given the water, energy, data, food, and transport infrastructure required to make this state of affairs possible, the remaining half more or less exists to serve the needs of city-dwellers. We have transformed the world’s rural landscape into a network of highways, dams, farms, feedlots, oilfields and data centres that are helpfully out of sight.

2. Slums are the cities of the future.
Help them, don’t bulldoze them. The planet’s urban population is expected to double between 2005 and 2050 to more than 7bn people. But urban land cover is expected to triple during that time, which means we are poised to cover more of the planet in the next 30 years than in all of human history. Most of that will consist of informal settlements and slums. Our great urban challenge will not be building gleaming new cities from scratch, but giving these people the rights and the means to gradually transform these places into world-class cities in their own right, just as Dickensian London and Gangs of New York-era Manhattan grew into the world-class cities they are today.

3. Mobility is destiny.
The shape of cities is defined by the state-of-the-art in transportation at the time of their construction. The layouts of Jerusalem, Venice, London, and Los Angeles each respectively bear witness to this. Arguably, the state-of-the-art today is the smartphone, which enables its owner to seamlessly locate, understand, and pay for multiple modes, while empowering transportation providers in ways that have never existed. The rise of Uber and its rivals has already changed how people perceive and use cities – with small but significant impacts on real estate prices. Google is already thinking long and hard about how autonomous cars might do the same. Mobile devices, urban mobility, and social mobility have all become entwined.

4. “Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.”
That is the future, according to science fiction author Bruce Sterling. And he is not wrong. The combination of mega-urbanisation, longer life expectancies, and climate change will have far-reaching, often disastrous effects on cities, especially if we fail to develop new models for developing, deploying, and financing new infrastructure. Solar panels on every rooftop and Tesla batteries in every basement sound great, but who is going to pay for them after a hurricane or typhoon has ravaged New York or Manila yet again?

5. Cities are ultimately good for you.
Physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt have made waves arguing that cities grow stronger, faster and better the bigger they get – roughly an extra 15% better every time they double in size. They have measured this increase in patents, wages, productivity and whatever else they can find data for. Clearly, this is not true for every city – maybe not for Lagos, definitely for London. West and Bettencourt argue this disparity has to do with cities’ ability to bring large, dense, diverse concentrations of people together in space and time. The Tube does that; Lagos’ traffic does not. The continued growth of London is a good thing, but only if it continues investing in necessary infrastructure and commits to granting all of its residents the right to use the city. The future has never belonged to ghost towns, gilded or otherwise.