Imagine it’s 2040. You wake up in your sunny, spacious apartment and take your morning coffee on the terrace full of green leafy plants, looking out at a sprawling city – and you can see quite far as air pollution is minimal. You make sure you close the door when you go inside as the newly rewilded spaces are full of birds and insects, which like to wander inside your apartment. You don’t like that so much. Although the honey from the bees on the rooftop is delicious.
You decide to work from your building’s downstairs cafeteria first, later fitting in lunch prepared by its kitchen from seasonal, local produce. You catch up with some of your friends who also live in the large building complex, then decide to cycle to the office for the kick-off meeting of a new project. Cycling is safe with no cars and trucks on the ground and everyone gets basic safety training in schools. But maybe you take a tram. Or one of the flying buses. As you grab an orange from a tree on the sidewalk you wonder why it took so look for modern cities to plant fruit trees available to all. Also that it’s now hot enough to have orange trees in your city.
Every home and communal place is equipped with tech to enable remote working, which doesn’t happen at fixed hours. Still, you all go into ‘offices’ every now and then, either for more immersive virtual experiences or to actually sit down in real life with your teams to talk through or plan important projects and to solve problems. You don’t much care much for your local office but you do like your monthly trip to headquarters to mingle with different departments.
You don’t own a car anymore. No one does. Vehicular traffic has mostly been lifted off the ground so people are safe to walk and move around in wheelchairs or bikes. While autonomous vehicles in the sky operate independent of human intervention and are thus considered safe you do occasionally wonder if a crash of the flying vehicles is actually scarier than the good old ground vehicles were, considering that debris can easily fall your head. But you ignore that thought for now as you continue going about your day, picking up the kids from school and taking them to one of the many local parks, meeting your other half in one of the roof gardens for a drink, doing sports or getting a healthcare appointment – all within walking distance from your home. And you deal with work throughout the day as you can truly work and communicate from anywhere.
During the weekend you’ll head to other parts of the large city to meet up with friends, go to the theatre or museum, although you could just as easily do this in your own neighbourhood. But you like the variety and diversity your big city offers. The different feel of each neighbourhood and the serendipitous meetings with strangers. Getting around on environmentally friendly public transport is easy and safe. Even for women. Even at night. Sure, you do worry sometimes that the technology your smart city is built on knows a bit too much about you and your habits but you trust the worst of tracking and surveillance had been eliminated. Though your best mate doesn’t think so and he is refusing to get that chip implant. He thinks you’re crazy to be so relaxed. You think… well.
The days of throwing away your groceries because you are too tired and uninspired to cook after long days spent in stuffy offices and crowded commutes are long gone. If you want something healthy and delicious without the effort your local canteens offer plenty of options from seasonal and mostly local produce. Sure, you also cook when you feel like it. But the canteen options are all healthy, nutritionally balanced and delicious as well as convenient. Some of your friends use a smart system connecting their nutritionist app and meal planner with their fridge and local markets, but you can’t be bothered. Today you got a drone to deliver dinner from a great Korean eatery. Everyone loves Korean food, right?
You finish the day where you started it, on your balcony, with a pre-bed lavender tea. You’re grateful for the cool and shade all the greenery on walls and roofs provides during too hot summers, moderating the urban heat island effect. As you look out at your beautiful city, home to tens of millions of people, you wonder how you survived the old days of long commutes, pollution and eating junk food delivered to your door.
How will your day look like in twenty years? How will your children live? How would you like it to be? I hosted a salon on Interintellect earlier this month with a fantastic, diverse group of people where we talked about how we would like our future cities to look like. A smart city with more greenery, flying cars, safer public transport, communal places built around people’s needs and wellbeing is what we came away with. We imagined much better infrastructure for the city of the future. I’ll be doing two more salons on the topic, with the next one focusing on the communities these cities would support, the spaces where we’ll congregate, live and work. Come along, bring your imagination and chat with us! I’ll be sharing the registration details shortly.
And thank you so much to everyone who attended the last salon, you were an absolute inspiration!