How we respond to these challenges will profoundly influence the quality of life of residents and what it feels like to live in such cities.
- Doug Crawford-Brown, Robert Mair, Koen Steemers
There is a clear line of sight on the broad features of the cities of the future.
They will be large, with significantly more than half of the world’s growing population crammed into them.
They will house an increasingly older population, placing stress on services to the elderly and a rising tax burden on young workers whose taxes pay for those services.
They will be environmentally constrained, require a lower environmental impact of almost everything we depend on today, and they will need more resilient infrastructure, buildings and economies as the climate shifts.
In at least the developing world, the megacities will be a complex and messy mix of formal and informal settlements, with no obvious governance structure covering the entire city.
These are very broad sketches of the challenges. The more interesting issues revolve around how we respond to those challenges, and how those responses affect the design, operation and governance of cities. How we respond will in turn profoundly influence the quality of life of residents and what it feels like to live in such cities.
The future depends on the innovations we create and put in place today. But what form might those innovations take? We divide them into the physical city, urban governance and the choices made by the residents of a city. Each is the focus of intensive research at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with our partners elsewhere and in the public and private sectors.
Professor Doug Crawford-Brown is at the Department of Land Economy, Professor Lord Robert Mair is at the Department of Engineering and Professor Koen Steemers is at the Department of Architecture.
Image: Dark City
Credit: GLAS-8
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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