Great Visions about the Cities in the near future.
These are some of the visions which have made me think the most, about how cities ought to be transformed in the near future. They are all from The Stock Exchange of Vision (cities).
Emilio Del Giudice
But I think that the separation between town and country should be a thing of the past, in the sense that, on one hand, it is certainly true that human beings need one another, and this is the reason why urban set-ups exist; but these urban set-ups don’t have to be the monstrosities that they are; they can be separated by green belts. So rather than the isolated megalopolis surrounded by disjointed nature, urban centers could have a maximum limit of, let’s say, one or two hundred thousand inhabitants, and with enough distance between them to enable cooperation, exchange, etc., thus avoiding the idiocy of isolated life; and these towns can be set apart from each other by belts of nature, so that, as well as cooperating with each other, human beings can have an easy relationship with nature.
Ray Kurzweil
Increasingly the public square is going to be in virtual reality. There is already virtual reality environments like “Second Life”, where we can go and game either in a large group or in an intimate encounter. Today they are cartoon like, ten years from now they will be very realistic. Twenty years from we will be able to hug each other and do anything from sensual encounters to business encounters to big town meetings in virtual reality environments. It will be just like real reality and we’ll be spending more and more of our time that way. So we’ll actually live where we want, we wont have to congregate in cities and when we want to get together we’ll be able to do that in these virtual environments. And the virtual environments will be a new art form, there will be millions to choose from.
Ervin Laszlo
The city of the future will be much more based on moving back and forth without having to actually, literally, move physically back and forth. In other words, we will be able to move virtually. Neighborhoods should and will, I think, develop much more and they will be semi autonomous neighborhoods. Already big cities, you think of New York like being one enormous city, but already it’s built on so many neighborhoods.
Alan Cooper
Our built environments will follow the shape of the transportation. So, if you build a broad network of energy consuming roads, you got a broad network of energy consuming suburbs. If you build a concentrated series of train based transit cordons you get dense construction which is much more efficient of energy.
Vandana Shiva
The countryside is the neglected part of the way we think about future. The city will look after itself, if we can look after the countryside. But the planet can definitely not take the explosion of urban centers the urban sprawl extinguishing life as it spreads, sucking water from thousands of miles away to maintain concentrations of human populations, taking every kind of energy to light up the life of the urban areas, while light is extinguished in the rural areas. These are changes we will need to make. And I am definitively among those who believe that we need lively, vibrant economies and cultures in the countryside. Defense of the countryside, promotion of the countryside will be a very important aspect of designing our cities.
